You Can Do Everything Right And Still Lose

The Amplified Impact Podcast
January 2nd, 2023

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Success and failure. Sometimes, the same actions can achieve both results. You can do everything right in order to succeed… but you end up failing.

If you’re a fan of Formula One racing, you know of the emotional highs and lows of the previous season.

While it was a wild rollercoaster, there are some great lessons we can draw from it that can be applied in business, investing, and even personal success

The concept of committing no mistakes and still losing, how a stroke of luck and other external factors can play roles in whether we achieve success or not, and the importance of resilience and adaptability in the face of challenges… are all universal lessons and insights for achieving success in various aspects of life.

 

TWEETABLE QUOTE:

“Forget the results, forget the outcomes. That will come with time and consistent diligent execution.” – Anthony Vicino

 

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Episode Transcript:

03_You Can Do Everything Right and Still Lose (Part One)

Anthony: [00:00:00] And welcome back to Amplified Impact. This is where we talk about how to build better businesses, invest in real estate, and how to hyperfocus on what matters so that you can maximize your return on life. Today is going to be a very interesting episode as I talk about some emotional highs and lows that I went through yesterday.

Anthony: While watching a sporting event, yes. I know if you’re listening to this and you know me, you know I’m not really a sport guy, but there are some corollaries here, some lessons to be learned that are going to directly impact us as entrepreneurs, as investors, as just high achievers, or just as people in general.

Anthony: There are some lessons here to unpack, and it’s going to be a wild episode that’s going to start with a. Now, if you know me, you know that I don’t really follow organized sports all that much. I follow chess, tennis, and as of last year, formula One racing. And that’s because Netflix had this remarkable [00:01:00] documentary, pseudo reality tv.

Anthony: That was so good and compelling. I was like, I need to keep watching this. So I followed, this was my first season following Formula One from beginning to end, and it was, it was a fantastic season as there was a great championship, race between Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton. Now, If you’re listening to this and like, I don’t care about race car driving, well stick with me because I’m, I want to share the story of the last race of the season and going into this race.

Anthony: It was dead tied for the championship between Max and Lewis. Tied on points. So somehow throughout the course of this entire season, we get to the very last race, deadlocked. It’s amazing drama. Like you couldn’t script this type of thing. And so it was just, whoever can win, whoever finishes the head of the other guy in this race is going to take it all.

Anthony: So this race is, I think, a [00:02:00] quintessential example of a scene that. Has stuck with me all my life since seeing it when I was a little kid. And it’s from Star Trek. I know. So now we we’re talking about Formula One Star Trek. Stick with me. I’m going to bring this all together. In Star Trek, there’s a scene where data, who is this human cyborg thing, has just lost the game of like three dimensional chess.

Anthony: So, you know, I love chess. So, this is particularly interesting to me. I guess I’m just a nerd. Love chess. Love. Okay, here we go. And he, he, from his perspective, he’s analyzing and he is got this machine brand and he is like, I can’t find what I did wrong. I didn’t make any mistakes. I didn’t mess up, but I still lost.

Anthony: And he couldn’t reconcile this. His, his, his binary mind could not reconcile what that really meant. And John Luke Picard, the captain comes in [00:03:00] and he says something super profound and impactful. It’s one of the most profound, impactful lines of probably any TV show ever. He goes, it is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose.

Anthony: That’s not weakness. That’s. Think about that. It’s possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. And that’s, that’s true. But it’s the second part of this, I, I think, is just so powerful. That’s not weakness, that’s life. Okay, so let’s use that to get back to Lewis and to Max into this final race of Formula one.

Anthony: Lewis Hamilton is dominating this race. It’s 58 lap. And from the beginning until lap 57 and a half, he’s winning. He’s not just winning. He is dominating by over 12 seconds, max has no [00:04:00] chance of catching him until some crazy things. That were outside of Lewis’s control entirely. Somebody else at the end of the race crashes.

Anthony: A yellow, safety car comes out. There’s all of this shenanigan with the rules and the stewards and the race director who are overseeing it, and they shuffle up the, the whole race in a way that we get a last lap. Between Lewis Hamilton and Max Ver step, and Lewis is in first, max is in second. They have one lap to decide who the winner is going to be.

Anthony: So think about that. This whole championship race this season, a whole year comes down to one lap. Now, this is where things are very harsh, is that in this setup, Lewis was so far ahead in first place that. couldn’t [00:05:00] have the luxury of pit stopping to get new tires, new fresh tires. So he’s on these really old raggedy ass tires that in a normal circumstance with his 12 second lead over, everybody else wasn’t going to be a problem.

Anthony: He would just stroll into the finish line and win it. But now with his main rival, right behind him, in his rival is on brand new fresh. Lewis Hamilton has no chance of holding off this guy, no chance. And Max passes him easily and takes the race and just like that, dominating the race for 57 and a half laps, 12 second lead.

Anthony: It’s all gone and he loses the championship as a result. Talk about committing no mistakes and still losing that. That’s the reality right there is that sometimes the cookie just doesn’t crumble in your favor and this isn’t [00:06:00] so important when it comes to business and entrepreneurship, investing just in life.

Anthony: Like to understand that you can do everything right and still lose and it sucks, but it’s not weakness if you accept that. And, and what I thought was so powerful is that there was a lot of shenanigan on the back end of this race. You know, the race, or the team leaders and some lawsuits and things like that.

Anthony: But Lewis, the guy who just had the championship just taken out from underneath of him, came out and he is like, that was a good race. Kudos to Max and to their team. They did a great job this entire season. They deserve this, right? He did not take this loss, this horrible break of luck and take that as an indictment of his ability or his strength.

Anthony: He took it and said that’s how it goes. And he showed so much strength in class in that moment. It was, it was an amazing thing. And for me, the lesson there is just that Charlie Munger talks about this all the time, is that we can’t [00:07:00] judge the quality of our decisions based on the results or the outcome.

Anthony: It’s like playing Russian roulette and getting one of the chambers, one of the five chambers that doesn’t have a bullet and you don’t, you don’t shoot yourself in the head and somehow to then make the. Equation that because I pulled the trigger and it didn’t kill me, it was a good decision to pull the trigger.

Anthony: No, the judgment that went into actually doing that was very poor. Like, don’t play Russian roulette. That’s a terrible idea. And so the outcome very often is not, we can’t, we can’t know how qual, how well how good of a decision that really was based on the outcome. What we can do is, Look at the quality of our inputs, our processes, our thoughts that led to the decision or to the actions regardless of what the outcome is.

Anthony: And I think this is very important when it comes to business because you can do so [00:08:00] much of the process, right? And for whatever reason, macroeconomic trends, covid hits like competition steps in and does something new and different that you can’t respond to. Regulation takes over and you’re just out.

Anthony: There’s so many things that are going to be outside of your control. And if you were just a judge, the, you know, your self-worth, which I think we often do based on the results of the achievement, then we’re going to be left feeling lacking. And so the takeaway here, I want you guys to really internalize it’s, is that.

Anthony: You can do everything right and still lose. That’s not weakness. That’s life. Now how we respond to that and how we get back on that horse and how we continue playing the game, that’s what’s going to really matter. And I can almost guarantee you that Louis Hamilton’s going to come back stronger next year, like you just.

Anthony: He’s accepted his role. He’s already looking for ways to improve, and if you can take that into every single one of your failures, you’re going to [00:09:00] be unstoppable on a long enough timeframe. This is the idea of like extreme accountability in real time. So I hope this story brought you some value. I hope it gives you some solace if you’re going through some hard times right now.

Anthony: If you’re struggling in your business, your investments and your life in general like to know that Maybe it feels like I’m just doing everything I can and yet it’s not working out well per okay. That’s okay. Just keep doing everything that you can. Forget the results, forget the outcomes that will come with time and consistent diligent execution.

Anthony: So that’s going to do it for me guys, if you don’t know, I’m Anthony Vicino. I’m a bestselling author, Sierra entrepreneur, and the co-founding partner of Invictus Capital, which is a real estate firm with over 30 million of assets under management and. I’m doing this because one, to learn, we have to learn, do, teach.

Anthony: And so by doing this podcast, I hope that [00:10:00] I can come to a better understanding and, and level up my own skills. But number two, I want to create a resource that I wish I had had when I was first starting my entrepreneurial or investing journey. So hopefully this brought you a little bit of value. If it did, do me a favor.

Anthony: Please, please, please share it with a friend. Go leave a review on iTunes. It means the world to me, guys, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

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