ENTREPRENEURSHIP AFTER 50
Be a Goldfish
The Impact of the 10-Second Memory
One of the most enduring scenes from “Ted Lasso” came in the first season, when Ted gives guidance to Sam, one of his best players, about bouncing back from failure.
After watching Sam get burned on the field, Ted approaches him and says, “You know what the happiest animal on Earth is? The goldfish. It’s got a 10-second memory. Be a goldfish, Sam.”
The Lesson
The lesson, of course, is that dwelling on failure is not where the learning lies, but rather in moving onto the next play with a focus on not letting it happen again.
Starting a business, particularly “late” in life, is rife with potential failure. But that means it’s also rife with opportunities to learn. We could make a list of failures a mile long from our first year in the pickleball business, and spend quite a bit of time dwelling on them, but instead we’ve chosen to note them, commit to getting better, and keep swimming.
The arguable downside in this approach is it doesn’t inherently build in learning loops. But it’s important to note that Sam’s failure on the field happened during practice, not during a game. As such, his failure had far lower stakes.
Our version of Ted’s practice includes three key components:
- An online project management tool, where we can note failures, assign next steps, and turn them into ongoing discussion points.
- A weekly full-team meeting designed to optimize the calendar, our programming, and understand where we’ve fallen short so we can improve on the fly.
- A nation-wide peer group of similar business owners, who meet biweekly to discuss what’s working, what’s not, and how to optimize each of our businesses.
Grooming Your Practice Field
Each of these components creates a practice field on which we can improve before applying our learning to the much higher stakes of online or in-person customer satisfaction.
Like Ted did when he took the job with AFC Richmond, we had to dial in our playing field. We didn’t start with a great project management tool, we had to find one. And we weren’t presented with a peer group, we had to establish our own, recruit other businesses to join, and create a platform for sustained conversation.
Incidentally, there is no more important place to have a 10-second memory than on the pickleball court, where bouncing back from momentary failures is in the DNA of the game’s best players. Like Ted does, they understand that to dwell on failure is to set yourself up to lose the next point as well.
So listen to Ted, and be a goldfish.
