>>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 Wang 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]
