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>>Male Presenter: Hi. Welcome. I've invited my friend Justin Locke to
come speak. I've heard him speak before and he's very
entertaining. He's an accomplished musician, composer, author, and speaker. I
hope you'll enjoy.
[Applause]
>>Justin: Well, good morning, everybody. [Audience responds with "good morning"]
>>Justin: It's great to be here at Google. I'm quite honored to be here. Okay.
This book. Principles of Applied Stupidity. This
book -- well, it's -- how can I describe this? It's
a collection of unorthodox management techniques is the
best way I describe this. [clears throat]. Just to give
you background on it. I grew up on a farm out in the middle of nowhere
somewhere near Toledo, Ohio. It wasn't actually the middle
of nowhere. It was magnetic nowhere. If someone says to you
get lost and they point, they're actually pointing
to my hometown. That's where I grew up. And I came to Boston
with a very cheap string bass and a how-to book and a
one-way ticket. I got off at the Trailways bus station and
something of a fairy tale occurred. Two two years after this
I found myself playing the double bass, in the Boston
Pops, which is arguably the most famous orchestra in the world. And that,
by itself, is a story which I tell in my first book,
Real Men Don't Rehearse. But something occurred, when I was
in that environment, that constantly bothered me.
Which was this question of why were certain conductors so
much more famous and effective than others. There were
some conductors who would come out and virtually
with no work, no effort, nothing came out of their mouth
and we in the orchestra were just jumping up, cranked up
in our seats, eager to play for these guys. And there'd
be other conductors who are highly skilled, very talented,
very good looking. They had everything you would
want in a conductor and we just couldn't get excited
about these people at all. In fact, we actually kind of
resented them and got perfunctory with them. And I
was always curious as to why this was. And I spent an
awful lot of time analyzing this. And I'm going to -- well,
I'm just going to tell you a story about working with
one guy. You're all too young to remember him. His name is
Arthur Fiedler. He conducted the Boston pops for
about 50 years. And by any metric you care to name,
he was the most successful conductor in history. I mean,
if you put Arthur Fiedler here, the closest guy is Leonard
Bernstein right about here. It's astonishing what he did in
terms of recordings sold, tickets sold, fame, notoriety,
Guinness Book of World Records for the biggest classical
music concert ever. Now, they have this thing at
Pops where you can go. If you ever go to pops you don't
go by yourself. You will go with five or ten or
20 of or your organization will buy 500 tickets. And sometimes
there will be nights where one organization will
buy every seat in Symphony Hall. For example, one night there
was an orthodontist convention was in Boston and
every single person in the hall was an orthodontist. And
we proceeded to play "Shadow of your Smile", "All I want
for Christmas is my Two Front Teeth", followed by the "Theme
from Jaws". [laughter] It was all thematically appropriate for that
crowd. Well, one night the American Guild of Organists
had an annual convention in Boston and they bought every
single seat in Symphony Hall. That meant every single person in there
was an organist also, of course, organists in churches
are generally choir directors. And they got this guy,
you also won't remember this guy, his name was E. Power
Biggs. America actually -- if you can imagine an organist
on American Idol winning it, that's how famous this guy
was back in the 50s. He was America's church organist.
And they wheeled him out for what turned out to be his
last public performance. He died like two months later.
And you know, so we're going to play this organ concerto.
The bass part to the Hallelujah Chorus was in my folder.
And we just glossed over it in rehearsal. No one said
anything about it. Nobody mentioned it. We didn't play
it. I'd never played the Messiah before. I didn't know it.
But when you're in Pops, you just do what you're told.
So we get to the concert that night and I'm just assuming
we're going to play this and the trumpets are going to
play the vocal parts because I don't know what's going
on. So we play the organ concerto and Fiedler turns to the
crowd and he says, "we have an encore for you. We're
going to play the Hallelujah Chorus. And we want you to
be the chorus." And there's this murmur in the crowd like
what's this what are you talking about. And Fiedler
turns around, he's a grouchy guy. And he says, "c'mon, you all know it." Well, of course,
they're all choir directors; they have to teach the parts
twice a year so they have it all memorized. So try to get
the situation here. You've got Symphony Hall,
arguably one of the finest acoustic spaces in the entire
world. You've got E. Power Biggs, at the time, the
most famous organist in the world. You've got the
Boston Pops Orchestra, the most famous orchestra in the world. Arthur Fiedler, definitely the
most famous conductor in the world. And 2000 professional
singers that have been drinking for the last hour
and a half. [laughter] So we start to play the Hallelujah
Chorus. And it's the seventh inning stretch of classical
music, if you've ever had the dubious pleasure of sitting through
the entire Messiah. And so, there's all this rumble of
chairs because it's tradition for everyone to stand
up. So all these 2000 people, they stand up. What
is not tradition, is that they started to sing. Oh boy, did they start
to sing. Now 200 people is a big choir. We had 2000.
And Symphony Hall is designed to have sound over here splay
out into this shoe box space. Every single seat was
a 90 decibel sound source. These people were just--. And
when that first hallelujah hit the stage, it was almost
like a shock wave it was so loud. Knocked me off my stool.
And we got to the King of Kings. 500 basses, 500
tenors -- tore the roof off the joint. Now, I have this -- I've
played like 3, 000 concerts in my professional career. And I
have this list of the top five most exciting musical moments
that I ever experienced on my list. That was on the top five. It was just so breathtakingly
wonderful. So, you know, this is kind of my -- this is
like my first week working with Arthur Fiedler. And it's a wonderful story and I
love sharing it. There's just one problem with this story.
Just one. We did not rehearse it. Now, if you've talked
to any conductor, any conducting class, any conducting
symposium, any conducting book, they will all tell you
that rehearsing equals a better show. And if you
don't rehearse, it equals a worse show. And I can
understand if we had an okay performance or kind of
muddled through it, it would have made sense to me
since we didn't rehearse. But it wasn't just a good
performance, it was one of the greatest performances of
my life. And there was no rehearsal. And this makes
absolutely no sense really, you know, in terms of all my
reference that I learned in music school. So what do you
do with that. Well, for now, we're just going to pretend that
it's a statistical outlier. We're just going to ignore
it. You know it was just one of those things. Call it a
phenomenon. Let's put it aside. Now, Arthur Fiedler -- we
have to talk about him for just a minute. This guy
without question, right? By any -- again, any metric you
care to name -- the most famous, most successful conductor of all time ever.
Now, this guy grew up in the Back Bay, graduated from
Boston Latin. There's nothing terribly exotic about
that. I'm sorry with all due regard to Boston Latin High School. Or
back the Back Bay. Didn't graduate from college. Never
composed anything. He was an okay looking guy, but you
would not say he had sex appeal. Nothing -- you know, he
didn't have an interesting accent. He didn't have a lot
of syllables or exotic consonants in his name. His baton
technique kind of resembled someone chopping salami. It
was kind of this circular motion. So there are all these
attributes that I just described to you, you would think how is
it this guy is the most successful guy. I work with
hundreds of conductors. I publish music. They have
masters degrees. They have talent. They compose. They
have nice cars. They have a rich wife. They have a good
tailor. Arthur had none of this and yet he was the
biggest star. Again, this is cognitive dissonance happening here. Why is this? How could this
be? Let me tell you one more story. There's a guy -- I'm
sure you've heard of this guy. Henry Mancini. He
wrote Moon River. If you don't know who this is, gee,
I kinda feel bad for you. He wrote Victor/Victoria. Just one of the
finest musicians I ever worked with. And the first
time I worked with him he came into Symphony Hall.
It was a program of all his own music. We're doing
all these beautiful pieces. "Days of Wine and Roses".
"Two for the Road". And it's just really lovely. We
get to the Pink Panther in the rehearsal and he looks
at us and he says, "you all know this, don't you?" Well,
who doesn't know "Pink Panther"? Sure, we know "Pink Panther". He said, "fine"
and he just turned the score over and we didn't rehearse
it. Now, we knew Pink Panther generally. We did
not know this arrangement of Pink Panther, at all.
So, but you can't, in a Pops rehearsal, the protocol doesn't
let you raise your hand and say, "excuse me, I think we
should rehearse this." You can't do that, because the conductor
is in command and control. So we get to the concert
that night and we're going along and we get to the point
where we're going to play Pink Panther. And I have
to tell you again 3, 000 concerts in my professional career.
Never in that entire time in 18 years have I ever seen
an orchestra so completely keyed up, geared up,
eager, desperate to play a piece absolutely at the
highest level of their capability. And it wasn't Mozart's
40th. It wasn't Mahler's 3rd. . It was the Pink Panther. And of course,
the audience could sense this intensity and they get
completely drawn into it and hypnotized. And there's this
massive applause. So again, you've got this problem. He
didn't do it correctly. He didn't follow the proper
procedure. He didn't do what you're supposed to do. I
mean, did he forget? Is he just dumb? Why didn't he
rehearse? And you'd think. Okay, you forgot to
rehearse. He should be punished with a barely adequate
performance. But this is also on the top five list and
there was no rehearsal. So this kind of thing grinds in
my mind. I'm going to offer up a possible solution here
which is just a mathematical possibility. But I would
like you to consider the possibility that maybe Arthur
wasn't so successful and those concerts weren't so
wonderful -- not in spite of the lack of rehearsal or not
in spite of the apparent incompetence-- but because of it.
Now, this is a big, big step here. But I think I can
explain how this works by telling you yet another story.
Years ago, the royal ballet of London, England -- very,
very chichi ballet outfit-- comes to Boston on an
international tour. And as is customary, they hired a freelance
orchestra to come and play in the pit. And I was the
principal bass player for this one week run of this
thing. About 50 people in the pit of the *** Center. So
conductor comes out and they have their own conductor
with them of course. We do our first rehearsal and we
have lunch and we come back. And at the beginning of the
second rehearsal, this guy comes out and he says
something very, very strange. He says -- he kind of looks
around like is the boss in earshot. And he says, I have
a terrible confession to make. Who doesn't love a
terrible confession? So of course dead silence. Do
tell. And he says, "I'm tone deaf". And we all just -- we
were so confused. We just burst out laughing that he would
say that. Then he says, "Oh, but if you play in the wrong place,
I can hear that. I can tell if you're playing in the
wrong place. So don't play in the wrong place." Now,
there's a couple things happening here. First of all, he
pointed out to us in a very tactful way the importance of
when you're playing for a ballet, the rhythm is a whole
lot more important than prissy issues of playing in tune
or out of tune or even wrong notes. Because the ballet
dancers have to have the beat. Musicians they tend to
meander off into these less important things. But
something else happened that was more interesting than
that, is that, in that environment, where you're coming in
and you've got a boss and sometimes you are freelance or
whatever you're working for somebody. There's a default
of passive obedience. They're in charge. You want to
get hired again. You don't want to get fired. So what
do you do? He's the boss, you come in and you do what
you're told. And this is the common mythology of
orchestras that orchestras are just these extremely
obedient creatures that passively obey this waving stick
around in the air. And actually that does happen to a
certain extent because why work harder than you have to.
Just play the notes and do what's required; nothing wrong.
But when someone is saying that they are completely and
totally incompetent, it's very hard to be passively
obedient to somebody who's saying, "I have no idea what I'm
doing". And at that point. We all knew it was a joke.
But at the same time we went along with it. And I just,
at this point, I went to the other bass players and the
principal second violinist. And I said okay, the poor guy --
he's tone deaf. We don't want him to lose his job. I
guess we're all going to have to step it up and cover for
this guy. Why not? We don't get the guy in trouble. So
now I'm dealing directly with my section and the
principal second violinist about the time and the rhythm
and I have gone from being passively obedient to being
very assertive, aggressive and all this kind of
collective individual leadership that if the oboe has the
solo, now they're in charge. And if the trumpets are
playing, now they're in charge. Now this conductor he's
just sitting back puffing on the cigarette like every ten
minutes. He says oh, the dancers are up in the air on
bar 47. Could you hold that a little longer? Oh yeah, fine. And
we just went back to doing our thing and being totally
internally led like this. And we went from this passive
obedience mode to this highest level of performance mode.
And he did this not by being the standard -- there's all
these books about how to be a great leader and excellent
leader-- and this guy basically said he was a total dope
and he got this result. And I kept having all of these
experiences of seeing this. You know? There's something
to this. There's something to this kind of thing. So I
guess -- I guess the next question is, "Justin, if this
works so well about, if this is such a great system, why
doesn't everybody do it?" It's an excellent question.
I'm going to introduce a new phrase to your lexicon this
morning. I call it "classroom conditioning." We spend
something like -- I don't know what the number is -- but
it's at least 700 billion dollars a year putting people
in classrooms. Now whether people learn or not or what
they're learning or what they're doing but what does happen
and there are officers making sure that you sit in a
classroom. And there are certain things that you learn in a
classroom regardless of whether you're a good student,
lousy student, interested good teacher, bad teacher. One
of those is don't be late. Everybody knows not to be
late. Don't make mistakes. Follow proper procedure. And God forbid don't make so many mistakes
that you fail. That is just unbelievably bad. And it becomes
almost like a morality as opposed to just a rational
approach to whether or not you're acquiring information.
There's good things which is getting a perfect score. And there's bad things which are
failing and not solving the problem. So in writing this
book what I wanted to do is say, "okay, let's take a look
at these things that in a classroom environment and other
environments, of course, are classified as taboo. And we use the
word "stupid" here because that is a shaming statement.
It's almost like a new curse word to call something
stupid. That's bad; don't do that. I said, "well, what if
we took these things that are classified as bad, always in
classroom culture, and applied them sparingly?" I don't
mean running down the street raving like a lunatic, but
just occasionally doing things wrong. Just occasionally
admitting to ignorance. Occasionally failing. What
would you get? And suddenly the light went off and I
understood that what these conductors were doing was exactly
that because and a light went off there's something that
I call the hero reflex. If you're walking down the
street and you see Einstein up a tree, well you're going
to assume he's smart guy; he can figure it out, he'll get
down and you'll just go on your merry way. If there's a
pathetic little kitten up a tree just mewing with an IQ of 6,
you and the guy next to you that you never talked to
before. You will call the things. Your problem solving
capability that you never thought you had, will be engaged
to get that kitten down from the tree. And pretty soon
the whole town's there with the fire department, why? Because the
kitten was helpless. It's this hero reflex. And these
conductors -- every single great conductor that I played
for-- understood this and engaged my hero reflex in
doing this. And that's why I wanted to explain this. So I want to tell you one last story
if you have any questions, that will be interesting
to see how this works. One of the biggest principles
of applied stupidity that I just love is let other people
solve the problem. We are conditioned in classrooms
to solve problems. If I gave you a Rubik's Cube in
a classroom, you wouldn't be able to resist it. You would all
start solving it. If I gave you all tests, you would
just immediately start as the train leaves Baltimore
at 40 miles an hour. And this is how you get rewards in
a classroom environment, is who solves the most problems
the most accurately. Whoever does that the most. It's
a constant conditioning. So let me tell you this story.
This isn't about a conductor but it's about an interesting
manager. I was the de facto choreographer in the Pops.
We always were fooling around, spinning basses in certain
encore pieces. And it was never official. We were
never supposed to do it. That was part of the fun
is that we weren't supposed to do it. We just did it anyway to
disrupt the concert. So John Williams is conducting and
we're going to Japan for our first big international tour.
Two weeks in five star hotels in Tokyo. It was fun.
And I was really looking forward to this because I was
ready to spin basses in Tokyo and just have fun on
this tour. So I get to Tokyo; I'm in Suntory Hall or wherever
and I open up the folder to see which piece I'm going to have everybody
spin the bass in, right? So I'm looking through the
encores. Well, there's no spin in this piece; you can't do
it in any old piece. It has to be musically appropriate. Because it's choreography. Well,
there's no spin in that. No spin in that. All the
pieces that we spun basses in -- John Williams is a great
guy. Fabulous musician. One of my favorite conductors
of all time. Very quiet guy. He's very shy. It's
amazing. His music is so huge and yet, personally, he's
just the shyest, quietest man. And it was very subtle but very
clear. He didn't want me spinning the basses on this
tour in Japan. That's how he let me know he just very carefully--.
Because it's hard. You have to work hard to remove all those encores.
So I had some sake and mourned the loss and moved on with
my life. What do I care? I get paid the same money
whether I spin the basses or not so I'm having fun. Well, the
third night of the tour, I'm backstage at Suntory Hall minding
my own business. And I'll euphemize; I'll call her
Suzy. This is a very powerful person in the Pops organization,
one of the top managers. I never had the temerity
to look this woman in the eye, much less talk to her. And
you know I just don't want to get in trouble. But anyway
I'm standing there minding my own business. Let's
call her Suzy. Suzy walks up to me backstage and starts
yelling at me. She's upset. She says, "Justin, Justin
I have to talk to you right away." My heart is just
pounding I'm so scared. "Yes, yes, yes, Miss Suzy." "The basses
aren't spinning. The basses aren't spinning. Why aren't you
spinning?" I was so shocked that she would ask this question;
I didn't know what to say. And she just keeps yelling,
"the basses aren't spinning. The tour's in trouble. The
promoters are upset because they thought we'd spin the
basses. They were expecting all this stuff to happen
and you're not doing it. What is wrong with you. The
basses--". And she was like -- I couldn't even -- I couldn't
even make out what she was saying half the time. And
I was trying to calm her down. I said, "you don't understand
there's no music for us to spin to." She would not listen to
it. And she finally is just waving her arms and just walks
away in this upset state. And there I am, backstage
at Suntory Hall, you know, fifth chair bass player. It's not my job
to do this. Suddenly it's my fault that the tour is in
trouble. So I'm scratching my head. Well, I grew up on
a farm. I'm a self-reliant young man. Let's see if I
can solve this problem. So I go back to the music and
I went through every single encore and sure enough in "Seventy-Six Trombones" there was
a musically appropriate spot where we can spin the basses. So, I get the basses
together and we have a little talk about it and I get the
percussion section involved in a little extra punch and
we're doing the concert and we're going along. Now, in
Japan audiences are very, very quiet. It's not like
Symphony Hall here in Boston where we have to tell
everybody to shush and be quiet because they're talking
so loud at the beginning of the concert. They sit there like
Mount Rushmore. It's just absolutely stone quiet. And it's a
pops concert. They're supposed to be laughing and having fun but
instead they're just sitting there, just stone-faced. So we
get to this spin spot. I don't know what's going to
happen, but I yell out ready and -- and seven basses go
twirling wildly and the percussion section does a little
siren thing and this audience which had been sitting
there like an ice sculpture for an hour and 45 minutes
goes ape. They jump up. They're screaming, pointing.
It's all in Japanese. I have no idea what they're
saying. And I could see Suzy off stage with all the
promoters and sponsors and they're all "Hai, Hai".
Everybody's kissy-faced like this and we're playing the
last sixteen bars and John Williams -- the John Williams-- is up
on the podium conducting away looking right at me [laughter] with
this defeated look like "Justin, I can't fire you because
they're having so much fun but what am I going to do with
you" look on his face. [laughter] And we're great friends. He calls
me "Le Voce"; I call him "maestro". It's our little thing.
But anyway, I have a little sequence of questions to ask
you here which is first of all -- who did all the work of
solving the problem. Who did all the brilliant work and
all the hard work solving the problem? I did. Who took
all the risk of the solution proffered not working. I
did. Who took all the heat from management that didn't
like the solution. I did. Who got all the credit for
the solution that I came up with? Suzy did. She did not
solve the problem. And for years, I walked around
thinking I was so smart because how is this woman who has
no brains who can't solve a simple problem. How is it
that she's making all this money in this wonderful position and here I am such a brilliant guy
and I'm getting nothin' and I got no job security. I finally figured it out. It took
me 20 years to realize, she was a whole lot smarter than
me. She was using a principle of applied stupidity. So,
that's just one angle I do in the book how to use failure
for wonderful effect. How to use mistakes for
wonderful effect. How to not follow proper procedure
for wonderful effect. There's all these -- there's ten basic
and 25 more advanced. And just to sort of wind it
up here. One of the main principles in the book is what
I call -- well, it's number 5. Which is fear of looking
stupid is an enormous force. The fear of looking stupid,
which is really the fear of feeling vulnerable of being
embarrassed. It has nothing to do with IQ -- is
constantly used -- actually that fear is magnified constantly by all kinds of ads. We have smart
money. We have smart banking. We have smart cars. What
does that mean? It's all about smart things -- that's
a good thing. You should get that. All your neighbors
will admire you because it's smart. But you can't
really put -- you can't codify anything specific
about that. Anything that's stupid -- that's just something
you disapprove of. And so, there's this fear that's
kind of lurking out there. You know, for me, I learned
a lot of fear of failure even though I was an A student
in school. I was terribly afraid of getting an F. I was
terrified of it. And I'm having a lot of fun now being a speaker
now, being an author. I just wanted to do this. And I could
have started 20 years ago because I certainly knew
how to write and I certainly knew how to talk but
I was afraid of failing at it. So I kept looking for ways
to do it without failing. I was in this failure avoidance
mode. And I just kept, you know, kind of in this
state of not really going anywhere. I wasn't failing but
I certainly wasn't succeeding and I finally just out of
desperation or disgust, I'm just going to go and fail.
And I started printing books and I thought I would
have, you know, all these self-published of boxes of
moldy books in my garage and I keep selling out. 10th printing
of these things. It's crazy. And I never thought
I would -- if I hadn't just gone and tried it
and made the mistakes I never would have learned all these
things. So I guess my mission in life, really, is to
deal with not about giving you a work around. You'll see
there's no Powerpoint here. There's no DVD. There's no
workbook. There's no to do list. There's no 50 tips
and tricks. I'm really kind of into a mental form of Toyota
lean management. If you're afraid of something,
if you're afraid of failing, this is wasteful. If you're
avoiding failure, this is wasteful. This is not a efficient
way of getting to where you want to go. And I
find that when I deal with people as a coach or guru or speaker,
I have one goal and one goal only and that is to
somehow remove fear from people's thought processes because
there is so much of it as a by-product of classroom conditioning
that we don't really figure that in to what we're
getting out of it as all these people who are now afraid
to try anything new because of the fear that they've
acquired. So, I found that when I remove fear from someone
or myself, what remains is consistently wonderful.
It's never expected and that's what these top conductors
did. They removed my fear of, "Oh, I might get
fired. Am I going to get laughed at for presenting my
most intense, emotional, vulnerable self to the audience?"
I'm afraid of that for good reason. I don't want to be
embarrassed. But the top conductors made it impossible
to do anything else but that. And all the also-rans did the exact opposite of
that. They made me very protective. And so, my one big
message for you today is, number 10 -- principle number 10.
Embrace your inner idiot. And you can do this very
easily by using the principles of applied stupidity. And
I want to thank Alex for inviting me over here today. It's
been really great to be here. Now, at this point
there's -- I'm going to try and use some principles of
applied stupidity. I'm in an extremely vulnerable position right now. I'm in a desperate state
because if I say are there any questions and no hands
go up, it's going to look really bad. [laughter] So I'm
hoping -- and this is actually you can use a principle of applied
stupidity yourself. If one of you raises your hand and
asks a really dumb question, every one else in the
room is going to say, "oh, I was too embarrassed to ask a question.
But I have such a better question than that." So
I'm hoping one of you will just have the guts to ask a really
awful question and hopefully that will kick start
the rest of it. Do you have any questions for me today?
Yes, sir?
>>Male #1: I was wondering sometimes I wonder about practice practice and
in many ways
>>Justin: Practice effects?
>>Male #1: people practicing too much.
>>Justin: Oh, in music you mean.
>>Male #1: In music and I think even in business. A lot of times I feel like
people perform better when they're taken out of their
comfort zone because it kind of makes them wake up, pay
attention, and be more alive and more focused on what they're doing.
>>Justin: That's absolutely true. I'll just repeat it for the
microphone people who practice too much. We have a
saying at Symphony Hall, which is "don't wear it out.
Save it for the show". First time I played with the Boston
Symphony, it was for Shostakovitch Tenth symphony. I had never heard it
seen it before. They called me at ten-fifteen for a ten o'clock
rehearsal. [chuckles] There I am trying to play this piece. So I
came back between rehearsal and show and I'm practicing. And the stage
manager poked his nose out the door and he says, "don't
wear it out. Save it for the show." I never forgot
that. I actually had a client, big company. Will remain
nameless. They have all these engineers. And I said to
the HR person, "what is your biggest problem?" And they
said our biggest problem is the engineers can't bear the
thought of making a mistake. So they spend three
times as much time doing stuff because they can't bear
the thought of having an error and everyone else pointing
at them and saying "oh, you made a mistake". And you're much better off doing--. Definitely
in the music world, in the amateur realm, people
just rehearse and rehearse and rehearse into the ground.
And the better conductors, Bernard Haitink is classic
for this. He lets everybody go an hour early because everybody
likes that. They play better because they like him. So
yeah, I'm just reinforcing. Absolutely. Yes, dear, back
there.
>>Female #1: I think that makes sense and I feel, like, for a business person, usually
that's true. But is it true with, like, for kids that,
you know, that are new at something. It's because you guys
are all skilled when you use the Boston orchestra and stuff, that's,
like, a skilled group of people that have already reached
a certain level that can get away with not practicing. Do you know what I mean?
>>Justin: Yes, I understand your question.
>>Female #1: Has to be reached before that philosophy can be.
>>Justin: Well, I'm always afraid someone's going to ask that
question because it's a really good one.
>>Female #1: Because I have kids and they never want to practice
>>Justin: They never want to practice of course. Well, I'll tell you
what happened to me was that -- I was 19-years-old and the
phone rang and Boston Pops was kind of desperate and
they hired me and I was not really ready to play in a major
orchestra. So I went in and they don't slow down for
you. They just -- my first rehearsal of Beethoven's
Fifth with them was "Da-da da-da; da-da-da-da. That's fine, see
you tonight". What? Excuse me? But well, we hired you. You must know
it. And there's this constant expectation that, well,
you must know this and they put you in a position where
you're going to be embarrassed tonight but we don't we're
assuming that you can do this. We're trusting you. And when
people -- I did an article on this called the Power
of Trust. When I guess when Leonard Bernstein is conducting you, he's got this
aura of saying, you know -- I'm sorry, your first name is?
>>Male #2: Gunther, Gunther >>Justin: Oh, great. [laughs]
Couldn't be Dave or Bob. So, if I'm Leonard Bernstein, I'm gonna say to you,
"look, you're the best bass player I've ever seen and I
can't wait to hear you play tonight. But I have this power of
perception. You're even better than you thought you were and I'm so excited. I
hurt my arm so you're going to have to lead it tonight. Good luck."
And they would constantly put you on the spot of having
to do these things. Yes, it is a situation where these
are very accomplished people. But I played for Leonard
Bernstein when I was in high school. He came to a high
school thing at Tanglewood we did. And he treated us the same as he treated the
Boston Symphony. He just stood there and said, "boy, you
guys just sound fantastic". And when Leonard Bernstein
says that, you're just like, "well, we could be more
fantastic. Hang on." [laughter] It was not this thing, "oh, you
made a mistake; let's fix your mistake." You can't really
fix mistakes to greatness. That never gets you there.
There has to be this higher goal which now the mistakes
become--. Just one day, I said I got tired of making mistakes. I
did and I went home and I practiced eight hours a day. I
was insane. I'd start at midnight and go till dawn. I
was crazy. Believe me. That's another story. I
practiced scales and arpeggios eight hours a day. At the
end of that, I knew where B flat was. I never had to
guess or pray. Again, I knew where B flat was; it just wasn't a thing. But I
had to get that motivation going first. Without that,
you know then. If they don't really want to do it,
then you're swimming upstream. But that's an excellent
question. I hope I tried to address it. But you know it
depends on the dynamic of the group and the interests.
>>Male #3: I shared a story where a manager yells at a subordinate to get
something done.
>>Justin: Yes
>>Male #3: Subordinate gets something done. What's
stupid about this about that.
>>Justin: Well, let's see. What is stupid about that? If
he's -- well, I'm not sure I understand your question.
You mean what is wrong with it?
>>Male #3: You're claiming that she's somehow stupid. She may
not know how to do it, but does she have to? She's in a
position where she manages.
>>Justin: So often what would happen is we would
managers in my world, you get people who, if she had come to me and said, "Justin, we
have this problem. And I have a solution for it
and here's the solution I want you to execute this tonight."
Since I did not own that solution because I did not
come up with myself. We have to do it with gusto otherwise
it doesn't work. That would have put me into passive
obedience mode of executing Suzy's solution. Suzy said to
do this. Okay. What's the bare minimum we have to do
to make Suzy not dissatisfied. And you always get up to
just that level. that kind of thing as opposed to there's no
net. So now you have to really pay attention because
now it's my solution and in that environment. It's
kind of like when you get on a plane and you decide you
want to get the in-flight magazine and do the cross word
puzzle and someone else has already done it. It's not
rational to be unhappy about this because the problem
has been solved. But people like to solve problems.
My point is, my angle on this is, if you see
a problem, people like to solve problems. That's a preexisting
energy to tap into as opposed to just demanding that they
solve the problem. Understand they want to solve the
problem. They're eager to solve it. Now they have a
chance to be a hero because you tried to solve it and you
couldn't. Now they get to show off how smart they are.
These are little subtle mind games that you're playing
here that's really the point of the idea that you get
into this realm of doing that secretly. So that's the
best I can answer that question. I hope that was good
enough. More questions I hope? One more? Yes. Go
ahead. Sure.
>>Female #2: Yeah, it's kind of a question, but with background.
So I have a question about the classroom conditioning aspect that you're talking about. Is that
like an actual study or research because I'm asking because
I used to be a teacher and I was the big focus of mine
to fail in front of my students because I always thought
it was difficult as a student myself to feel comfortable
about failing. So every day in New York City you
have to have like a "do now" and we would do an activity.
It's an activity you do in front of the classroom.
And I would do something in my head called "what went
wrong and why". and I would make a mistake and students had to figure
out what I did wrong. They would actually have to acknowledge
that I did something wrong. If they didn't catch
it, we would go over it. So I wanted to know because this
is actually a popular thing that a lot of teachers do
now. When did you do this research for this?
>>Justin: I just came up with this last week [laughter] I'm
sorry. I love to say that I had a mound of research but
I don't. It's just kind of built up between -- I have a
different perspective on things because first of all I'm
an anachronism. I grew up on a farm. Most people are not
farm boys anymore because we don't have farms anymore.
And the other is I then grew up in a musical environment
on Symphony Hall which is really a 300-year-old culture
which is very different from what kind of happened around
the beginning of the industrial revolution where
classrooms were created with these compartmentalized, here's an English teacher, here's a math teacher,
here's a science teacher as opposed to tutors or apprenticeships were kind of the norm before
that because we had a specific population issues I just had a really bad time in school
even though I was a top student. It traumatized me in a lot of ways. I'm very sensitive to
this in other people. So I was approaching this, not a researcher but as an artist. So
if it's incorrect, well, sorry. [laughs] >>Female #2: I agree with the overarching
theme; I was just curious. I do think that is a big problem, obviously.
>>Justin: Well, thank-you. I'm always glad to hear that. I'm always worried someone's
going to call me out and show me to be a total idiot. What do you want, it's a book about
stupidity. [laughter] You always have that safety zone. Yeah, I think this isn't really
addressed enough. We've become 'education-happy' in this country. We're becoming test-score-happy,
college-happy. It's very strange to me. I'm going to get on my soapbox and say I think
should be educated, yes, but when you see people saying "all of our kids went to college"
and it's like "all of our kids bought a saw". It's a tool; it's not a goal in life. It's
something that you use to try to get to where you're going in life, ten, twelve years down
the road. And it becomes almost a state-sponsored religion in terms of its morality. I discovered
this--. I wrote a play, it was called "Peter versus the Wolf". One of the lines in the
show with the judge of this trial uses the word 'irregardless'. And people cringe when
they hear this word. I was trying to imply that the judge wasn't very smart because she
says 'irregardless of the metaphoricalness of the situation'; that was the line. And
people would come up to me after--. This was in Spokane and Texas and Massachusetts and
they would pull me aside like my fly was open [laughter], you know, in the voice. "Hey,
Justin", and they'd look around, "irregardless is not a word". And I'd look at 'em and say
"metaphoricalness isn't a word either". [laughter] No one seems to be bothered about that. To
me, this is evidence of trauma. This is evidence of trauma. I just see people who are always
coming to me with "how can I write a book like this?". And I say "well, you gotta take
a pen and actually, like, write the first letter of the first word". And they freeze.
[laughter] Because they have to get over all this fear and trauma, 'will I make a mistake',
'will I fail', 'what will people think of it'. And for me it was about getting the technique
of overcoming that fear and that trauma that allowed me to be much more effective and creative
and stand up in front of some of the smartest people around and talk about a book on stupidity.
Let's face it folks, this is pretty bizarre when you think about it. I'm making mistakes
constantly, even as I'm standing up here. But that's OK. I'm trying to connect with
you and hopefully make peoples' lives better. And I cannot be perfect when I do that. In
fact, the whole concept of perfection, on a test, why do we teach this as a goal? You
can't be perfect. You can be better but you can never be perfect. It's very bizarre to
me. But again, that's the classroom conditioning. And you get this model of 'perfection is possible'.
Now I look at myself, "oh, I'm not perfect, I have no right to be". So, I'm trying to
combat what I feel is some negativity. It's just basic fear, it's fear, in its many manifestations
and forms. Evil is a manifestation of fear. So I'm just trying to do my bit. I'm trying
to do my bit very imperfectly but thank-you very much for that. I appreciate the thought.
I'm hoping that people are --. There's something called emotional fractals. There's nothing
that I'm doing here that is unique. Everybody else
is doing a version of it. People are trying, thinking
about it and trying to fix things. They're doing their
own version of it. And what I'm trying to do is kind of reinforce
the fractals of people who are doing good things themselves, somewhere else.
And just have the courage to come out and say well, how about
this and see where it goes. You just never know. So
more questions I hope? Even dumb ones would be
appreciated. Yes, sir?
>>Male #4: Well, first you don't have to call me sir since we're
friends. [laughter] When you decided to write your first book which
was Real Men Don't Rehearse. Did you have this fear of
failure back then is this that was before Principles of
Applied Stupidity. So did you have a fear? You went to the publishers and you thought
they were going to laugh you out of the office?
>>Justin: Oh, this is a good story. He's asking you about my
first book which is my Boston Pops memoir, Real Men
Don't Rehearse which is just my Pops war stories. I
always wanted to be an author but I was like how can I do
this? Well, first I went to the bookstore and there's a
whole bunch of books on how to be an author. I call this
the wannabe author exploitation market and they have all
these books on how to write a book and they're all 25
dollars and I paid it happily. And then there are
books that have every single literary agent in the world is listed in these books. And
they have these instructions about how to write a query letter
to get published. I had this vision of a house in
a nice little town in Vermont with a white picket fence
and I was going to have a little office in there. I was just
going to get royalty checks every two weeks of 100,
000 dollars a pop and I was going to live this glorious
-- this was my dream. And so, how do I do this? Well, of
course I follow the instructions in these books not
realizing that I was going to look exactly like the 2 million
other people who were following these instructions,
sending the exact same query letter to the exact same
400 literary agent. I spent 400 dollars on stamps and didn't
even write -- Real Men Don't Rehearse is not my first book. I
wrote a relationship book. I wrote a cookbook. What
else did I write? Oh, I wrote a giant Hallmark card.
It was like Chicken Soup for the Soul. Because I was imitating
what I saw other people succeeding at as opposed
to being myself which is Justin Locke, who's a snarky
ex-bass player with a lot of good stories. Who would, who
would want to buy that? And finally just -- I got fired
from score reading and I said at that point -- that's
a long story. I work for the TV shows of the Pops. At that
point I said oh, well I can't lose any money by writing my
scandalous, salacious memoir about playing for the Pops.
It was really therapy to just sit down and write all these funny
stories of backstage concert disasters. And I submitted
this to about 50 literary agents or so. Every single
one of them says, "Justin, this is a really funny book.
Who wants to read a book about a bass player? Don't see
a market for it." I said, "well, how about all the other
bass players?" And they just looked at me funny at that point.
[laughter] I kept getting this same response. I said you know
somebody's going to buy this. I'm just going to give it a shot.
And I, you know, pulled out my credit card and went to
a guy who did wedding invitations down in Lakeville, Massachusetts.
And he printed up my book, 300 copies. I gave it to a friend of mine who gave it
to Paul Sullivan who's the host of the WBZ/CBS radio
show. He loved it and he wanted to promote the Fourth of July
Pops show. So he invited me down to WBZ to be on for
ten minutes on national radio. This is two months after self-publishing
my first book. And well, the other guests didn't show
up and I was an hour early because I didn't want to
be late. He brings me in. I start talking about the switchboard
lights up because everybody wants to tell their Arthur
Fiedler story. They all wanted to reminisce about Arthur Fiedler. I was live coast to
coast for two hours talking about Real Men Don't Rehearse. And
you know here I had all these other books that were not
me. I wasn't being myself. I was imitating to be safe because
I didn't want to be rejected. I didn't want
to fail. When I actually put my true self out for people
to -- because I was horrified by the idea of printing a
book and handing it to you and say would you like to
buy my book please sir and if you said no I would just
fall into a puddle of shame and self-doubt and self-loathing.
I was completely locked up by it. I was paralyzed
by it. And finally one day I said, "the hell with everything.
I'm going to publish it anyway." And low and behold it
just worked. My whole bass playing career worked like that.
I just kept falling into things. Principles. I just
ran into Mary Richardson at Planet Fitness one day
and I knew her vaguely from Channel Five. "Justin what are
you up to?" "I just wrote a book, called Principles of Applied Stupidity." Two weeks
later, I was on Chronicle. They did a whole show about
me. There's no -- you can always get into these structures
and procedures but consistently they just lead
you into this path of conformity. And I find if you just
go out and say "Well, here I am. I'm imperfect but I'm
doing my best shot", people warm to that. People recognize their own vulnerability
and their own isolation with that. And this is
what, again what Arthur Fiedler did. This guy -- he liked
to go to fires. He would chase around to look at buildings
burning. He just loved that. [audience chuckles] Can
you imagine, you know, Keith Lockhart, oh my goodness. He likes fires. [laughter]
What would the press office do with that. But he had
this personality. And he was honest. He was true
to himself. And I guess that's what I'd like to say to
people. There's so much pressure on us to conform.
So much pressure on us to get this car and this clothing
and this makeup and this surgery and this whatever. You know,
a lot of people I find don't see the beauty in themselves. I
didn't see the beauty or talent in myself for a long
time. So I'm trying to share that with people. That's what
this is about. Thank you very much for asking that
question and prompting a very long speech. Anyway. Any more questions,
comments? I'm open for that. Yes sir.
>>Male #5: You mentioned the hero reflex and it's like tricking
the people around you into building their untapped reserved.
>>Justin: Yes.
>>Male #5: I wonder how much can this exhaust this resource? If
they run on this hero thing all the time will it crash
and burn? Can the society handle that.
>>Justin: That's a very good question. Would we crash and burn?
I don't know. It's something that I just encountered this on a daily basis at a the Boston Symphony
and Boston Pops. This is how they operated. And you can't
do it 9 to 5. A workweek at the symphony is 21 and a half hours and you are
completely burned out from those 21. Because when you're
in a rehearsal or performance with them, you're
absolutely at your highest level and you have to go home and
sleep. There was actually a study about music students
that the better ones actually slept more and practiced less
because they were very intense when they practiced and
I do subscribe to that. It always surprises me. I've never
had a 9 to 5 job so I have difficulty relating to how
do you work intensely from 9 to 5? I don't think you can.
So would you rather -- it might be better to just say
okay we're going to have what we call services. Service
week. Eight or nine service weeks. And you can have
five concerts and four shows. I mean, five rehearsals and
four shows or 3 rehearsals and six shows. However you
want to do it. But that's kind of how you manage the
resource. It's a resource like any other; it's not infinite.
How do you manage it? I don't know. If it's an orchestra I can tell
you how to do it. But otherwise I'm just sharing the
orchestra culture. But thank you for that question.
It's a really good one. Boy, you guys ask good questions.
You're so smart. Go ahead.
>>Female #2: Don't say the word smart. It's funny because those
were the two words I didn't allow in my classroom, smart and
stupid..
>>Justin: Very interesting.
>>Female #2: Smart is a fixed thing. You tell a kid smart and they
don't work harder to be intelligent.
>>Justin: Well, this is true. I actually suffered from that
being the A student all the time. When I got out of
school, I was completely unprepared for life. The first
time I sat down to do my taxes, I thought it would be like
the SATs. Okay, I'll just answer all the questions. Non-farm income? [laughter] What is that?
April 14th. I had quite a meltdown that day trying to do that. I was
much better off. I think the kids who failed a lot in
school were much better prepared for life when they got
out of school than I was. I went through a lot of failure training. And I said okay
how do you recover from this. How do you do that. It's
a big topic. What is smart? what is stupid? It's
traumatizing. I just want to open that discussion for folks.
When I first wrote the book some people that I think
are very smart on my personal board of directors got
very upset with me because they had issues with the word
stupid. You'll find there are people who just they
were told they were stupid when they were ten years old by
somebody and now it's like an un-lanced boil. They're emotional
issues like this lurking all the time. And what these
top conductors did they always went around that instead of
trying to go through it. Well, if you have to read the
book I guess for getting all the little techniques to use
that making mistakes at just the right point. Anyway one
more going going? Ladies and gentlemen. Alex, Shannon,
and Google thank you for giving me this platform to speak.
I really appreciate it. Thank you for staying and asking
wonderful questions. It's great to be here. Thank you.
[Applause]