188: The Advantages of Being Stupid with Justin Locke

Pete Mockaitis
Justin, thanks so much for joining us here on the How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Justin Locke
Well, Pete, thanks for having me. I am honored and thrilled to be here. Let’s do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’d like to kick us off, I see you are also a fan of the beer Heineken and you have a bit of a history involving thievery in Heineken. What’s the story?

Justin Locke
Okay. Well, I guess if people have read my biography, I played bass in the Boston Pops for many years, would play concerts down at the Hatch Shell, you know, where you see the Fourth of July show, and then they would put us on a bus and take us back to Symphony Hall where all our cars were parked.

Arthur Fiedler had a refrigerator in his dressing room which door was wide open. Every door was wide open in Symphony Hall, nothing is locked up. It’s amazing. And I’ve discovered that they kept this thing stocked full of Heineken beers all the time. And even though we weren’t doing anything in the hall the beers were there, they were cold, and so I would go up, change, whatever, get into this or that, and I just go in there, take a couple of Heineken and stuff them in my pockets where no one could see them, and take them home and drink on Arthur’s tab. It’s a little brush with greatness.

Pete Mockaitis
And so now, Arthur, for listeners who aren’t familiar, Arthur is a famed conductor. Anything you want to share? Do you ever get caught? Were there any consequences?

Justin Locke
I never got caught and there were no consequences, and thank goodness I never got caught. It’s really the trust level at Symphony Hall is so high. I’m actually ashamed to admit now that I did something like that because there’s millions of dollars’ worth of instruments that’s just floating around in the basement of Symphony Hall and there’s just one security guard.

I could get in at three o’clock in the morning because he knows my face and I’d have full run of the building 24 hours a day. It was quite amazing. But Arthur Fiedler, I’m going to talk about him because he’s really the inspiration for the book. For your listeners, probably younger people don’t know this, Arthur was the most famous successful conductor in history and still is.

Conducting is one of the most competitive hard-to-get jobs in the world. And here, this guy, for 50 years, is winning Grammy’s, selling out halls, 30,000 tickets at a time, and I just couldn’t understand that because he had no talent. He was this little guy, he was from south Boston. He wasn’t from Croatia or London. He’s from down the streets, a hometown boy. No real sex appeal, couldn’t compose, couldn’t sing, couldn’t dance. He had a voice like gravel being shaken in a bag, like that. And he was not graceful. He looked like he was chopping pastrami.

So I’m kind of going, “Why is that?” I mean, this is cognitive dissonance of trying for years, decades really, to understand why Arthur was the most famous successful conductor in the world. And that’s what led to the writing of this book, was an attempt to explain that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so intriguing tee up there. So let’s dig in and tell us. So the book is called The Principles of Applied Stupidity. And so what exactly do you mean by that term and what’s sort of the basic main idea there?

Justin Locke
Well, you know, I guess I prepped too much for this thing but I’ll say what’s on my mind here. You and I and at least 80% of the American population, possibly more, from age five to 16 got up in the morning and went to school, usually a public school. Correct?

Pete Mockaitis
In that age group, yeah, that happens.

Justin Locke
Yeah, it’s the law. You don’t have an option. You have to go. And in that culture, to which the vast majority of us are repeatedly exposed in our formative years, there’s some paradigms in there that are very strictly observed. And one is it’s good to be smart, it’s very good to be smart, and it’s very bad to be stupid. You’re with me so far? Makes sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure. Yeah, it makes sense.

Justin Locke
Okay.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d rather be smart.

Justin Locke
Of course, I would rather be smart. So would you. And you actually develop an aversion to looking stupid. If the teacher calls on you and you don’t know the answer, tons of humiliation and invective are heaped upon you. If you don’t get an A, if you make a mistake, if you can’t solve the problem, these are all sins in that culture. And I use that word very specifically. It’s almost the power of sin. It’s an evil thing. It causes great embarrassment to make a mistake.

So I was looking at a guy who didn’t follow any of these rules. There was no solving problems. He wasn’t very smart. He wasn’t very talented and yet he was very successful. This completely contradicted everything that I was taught in school. And then I also saw, I was in this business for 18 years, played 3,000 on concerts, and I played with hundreds of conductors. And what was also interesting was how many conductors would walk in with sex appeal, with talent, with an Armani suit, with a rich wife, with a great tailor and just die, just couldn’t get started. They failed miserably, and that’s more cognitive dissonance. Why is this happening?

Pete Mockaitis
Maybe to orient us a little bit, what does it look like when a conductor fails versus crushes it?

Justin Locke
Well, the audience at the end either jumps to their feet, screaming, applauding, “Got to have more of this,” and the audience builds, or the orchestra just decides, “We don’t like you. We don’t want you to succeed, therefore we are going to ruin this concert.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Justin Locke
I did that myself on several occasions. There was one in my other book Real Men Don’t Rehearse, I absolutely destroyed a concert once. I just slowed the tempo down so far that it practically ground to a halt, and this conductor was clueless, didn’t know what was happening to him but justice was served.

Well, I’m getting off the track, but anyway, the whole concept of the smart and stupid, I’d became very fascinated with this because I found myself on a daily basis always wanting to be smart, and I was very eager for people to think of me as being smart, and I was terrified of people thinking that I was stupid. I really had this problem with it to the point where I had lost control of my own life.

Because if someone was offering smart banking, got to buy it. Got to have a smart car, oh, I got to buy it. Smart bomb? Uh-oh, you know. We hear this word smart a lot. It’s used often. And, to me, it became manipulative, “Why am I so terribly eager to be smart? And what would happen if I just reverse that?” You know who Dilbert is, I assume?

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Right.

Justin Locke
Do you know the Dilbert Principle?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, geez, I read that book years ago.

Justin Locke
Well, for your readers and yourself, the Dilbert Principle states, “The stupidest people in a company are promoted to management because that’s where they can do the least amount of damage.” And I always thought that was cute. But I said, “Well, what if you want to be a manager? Could you reverse that, and say, ‘By being stupid will I get promoted? If I can emulate stupidity, does this…?’”

Well, now, I’ll tell the story. Henry Mancini, for those of you who don’t know, he wrote Moon River, Days of Wine and Roses, Crazy World, Victor/Victoria. I’d worked with this guy back in the day, and one of the best conductors ever, and certainly one of the best lyrical composers ever. And he came to guest conduct at Pops, and we’re playing all these pieces, like I just mentioned, Baby Elephant Walk, Peter Gunn, he was a big stuff in the ‘60s obviously.

And he got to Pink Panther. I assume everyone knows what Pink Panther is and you know the theme. Okay, so he looks at us and it’s up in the folder, we’re all ready to play it in the rehearsal as is normal and we had never played this arrangement before. And he looks at us, and he said, “You all know this, don’t you?” And we all sort of, well, everybody knows Pink Panther, right? So we just said, “Yeah, we know Pink Panther.” And he said, “Great.” He turns it over and we don’t go through it.

Now, there’s 2,000 people that are going to come file in that night paying 65 bucks a piece and they want to hear this done right, and we have never played that arrangement before, so it’s an unknown, and you can’t stop the conductor rehearsal and tell him he has to do it. It’s protocol. It’s very severe. And we were all just absolutely terrified because we hadn’t played through it, and we didn’t know what was coming.

So we got to the concert that night, and at the risk of getting to hyperbole, I played a lot of concerts, a lot of big TV shows, never in my entire performing career have I seen an orchestra twisted, screwed up so tight that with eagerness to do everything absolutely precise, they were ready to eat their own livers, myself included, just absolutely obsessed with this piece and making sure we don’t screw it up, because we hadn’t rehearsed it. We were scared.

So the piece comes up. He gives a down beat, we start to play it, and it’s not Mahler, it’s Pink Panther, and this performance was astonishing. The audience immediately felt this intensity that was just like fog on the stage. And we get to the end of it, all leaped to their feet and there really was an extraordinary musical experience.

And for years I thought, “Isn’t that amazing that he forgot, and he did it wrong, and he didn’t follow proper procedure, and he didn’t prepare, and he got this fantastic beautiful result?” But, now, I’m starting to think that he did it on purpose because if we had rehearsed it then we would be confident, we wouldn’t be worried and we wouldn’t care. We would just play it and tone it in and that was the end of it. And I saw many conductors do this.

John Williams never tells you how to play anything. There’s this mythology of conductors being the great master leader and they’re telling everybody how to play everything, and we’re all watching that little white stick. We’re not looking at it. We’re reading the music. And John Williams, even when he talked, they couldn’t hear him because there’s this hiss in Symphony Hall.

But then he would say, “Let’s get started,” and he would just delegate. He just delegated. He’d never bossed, and he is now the greatest conductor in history. And I go, “Cognitive dissonance. Why is this the case?”

So I started to think about this, and maybe what I was taught in school isn’t wrong? What if I wrote a book that talk of the exact opposite extreme? And it was actually meant to be a joke. But by the third chapter, I said, “Wait a minute. This works. This is all consistent.” Well, what I like about it, I like things that are not so much actionable, is that they’re consistent. They work every time. There’s lots of advice you can get that if you follow, or maybe if you work harder or really crank up your desire, like they say in Think and Grow Rich that might work. But these techniques work 97% of the time and that’s the kind of thing I go for. It is a management book and it’s about human nature and how people are.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. And so that’s interesting that example with not rehearsing, everybody is so wound up and they put all of their intensity into doing well, and I’ve actually seen something comparable. I don’t know if I made this up but I called it second time syndrome which is like the first time you do something, you’re really focused on making sure, “Oh, I’ve never done this before. I really want to make sure I nail it. I’m going to talk to everybody, read all the instructions, directions, watch the timeline, do everything, everything, everything I can to make sure I don’t screw this up because I’ve never done it before. I’m kind of nervous about it.”

And then the second time it’s sort of like, “Oh, last time this was totally fine,” and so you’re just sort of chill out and not stressing it, not worrying it, just doing it, and then it ends up being worse than the first time around because you were so lax about it. And so I’ve seen that a couple of times in working with folks.

Justin Locke
Oh, yeah, that’s something that happens in concerts. Once you play the first night you’re a little unsure, but once you’ve got it under your belt, it’s like, “Oh, that’s easy.” And the second night stinks because everyone is now relaxed and not paying attention. The question is, “How do you reduce that in yourself or in others, like what you just talked about, that intensity?”

When you talked about being awesome at your job, you were awesome at it on the first try. You weren’t so awesome the second time. So how do you get that every time? And I will give you another example, I’ll name names. Seiji Ozawa, big, famous conductor.

Justin Locke
Oh, okay. Well, he was the music director of the Boston Symphony for 25 years, and I got to play for this guy on numerous occasions. I want to tell you, I’ve never been so panicked in my life before since as when this guy is on the podium. And again, you think he’s going to instruct you and you’re going to follow him, but he’s doing stuff that’s virtually nonsensical and you become totally panicked because you feel lost all the time when this guy is conducting.

I mean, he’s gyrating up there wildly. It’s like a panther having an epileptic fit. It’s going wild, the hair and the beads, “It was amazing but where’s the one? Do you see a one? Well, it’s too late now. Where’s the two? I couldn’t see it, did you?” And you become so panicked. Well, now, you’ve got listen to your partner, stand partner, because that’s the only reference point that you can depend upon. And that’s what orchestra playing is really about, is what we call ensemble, or the blending, if you will. It’s another term we use of listening and blending rhythmically with 90 other people. It’s like a flock of birds all turning at the same time.

And if a conductor becomes too dominant in saying, “Follow me, watch me,” you lose all of that internal blending energy. And by removing it, by not giving you any information, he forced us to always bring our best game to it. And, again, cognitive dissonance, makes no sense because everything should fit and be right the first time but, you know, in my experience it didn’t.

There’s another story, if I may, I went into being a video producer and I was just putzing around with little cable access stuff, they would let you come in and play with it. And a friend of mine hired me to make a fundraising video for a big hospital here in New England, and I didn’t know that I didn’t know how to produce the video. That’s how ignorant I was. I just thought, “Oh, you just show up. What the hell?”

And they got John Chancellor who was then the co-anchor of NBC Nightly News. I thought he was going to send me a tape scenario, they didn’t tell me he was going to be there in person. This is like having Tom Brokaw today on your first job, first time directing anything, “Here you go.” And it’s amazing how you bumble into things when you don’t know that you don’t know how to do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Justin Locke
Because the people who do know it’s hard are afraid, and they hesitate that one moment when the door opens and they don’t walk through it. So I went and did this video, and I hired a professional crew, and the director of photography said, “Justin, where would you like us to put the key light?” And I said, “What’s a key light?” And this guy just smiled, took the schedule out of my hand, and never spoke to me again the next two days. He just ran the shoot and I would stand there and look.

And the thing was, John Chancellor went back to New York and said, “I met this new director, Justin Locke. He was amazing. He hardly said anything and the crew just flew.” And on top of it, the tape that I edited it wasn’t that good. It really wasn’t very good. But when all these millionaires in Nantucket saw it, they all said, “Geez, if this is the best tape the hospital can produce they must really need the money.” And out came the checkbooks, they raised six million bucks in like three months, and I got hired to make all the videos for this company.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s wild. So then I don’t know what is the takeaway from that? I mean, on the one hand it makes sense that you don’t know you don’t know, it liberates things and the creative energies of everyone to be ensemble and to be blended, and for you to not be in the way. But, on the other hand, there’s a sub-optimal product but they like the sub-optimal product in terms of it being effective. So it almost just feels like chaos and randomness.

Justin Locke
Well, to a certain extent but they’re never just chaos. There’s always, well, I think if I get back to the whole paradigm of going to school, is that the idea of being afraid of failing, and you’ve seen people with stage freight. They’re terrified of being embarrassed, of making a mistake. They’re scared to death of trying to do something because they’re so obsessed with not failing and such an aversion to it that they freeze. Do you agree with that? Did you observe this yourself?

So it’s my contention that this is not natural. I think going through that process of being constantly grated and tested and corrected and embarrassed in front of your peer group for not having done your homework or making a mistake on a test, the pressure, it creates accumulative effect of trauma, of psychological, emotional trauma that, for some people, becomes overwhelming and they can no longer do and learn in a normal way, which is trial and error, or trial and failure is really what it is.

And a big part of what my book is is addressing not the theory so much as the emotional guts of the trauma that you’ve been through that’s made you afraid of failing. Because if I’ve been afraid of failing I never would’ve gotten into the Pops. If I had known how hard it was to do, I never would’ve attempted it. It’s only after I got there, I said, “Man, this was hard to get here.” It’s kind of like climbing a ladder. All you do is look at the next rung, but if you know the ladder goes up 500 rungs you may not even start.

But you can do it, just one rung at a time, but, man, when you think of it. So that’s kind of the… and it’s about human nature. We all want those strokes of people saying we’re smart, but the word smart doesn’t mean what we think it means at all. I mean, we tend to think this is superior brain power but that’s not what it means. The word smart really means it’s something you like. It’s up there with excellence and great. These are words that are very subjective, “This guy took care of me. He’s really smart.” “No, he’s not smart. You just like him.”

I can say, “This is a great podcast and you’re a great interviewer, but it’s excellent. It’s absolutely fantastic.” What does that mean? That means I like it. That’s all it means. And the word stupid, you know, “Well, this stupid person got in my way today. It could’ve been Einstein cut me off in traffic, I’d still call him a stupid idiot because I disapprove of what you are doing. It upsets me and bothers me.” And these are invectives, these are the new swear words, the new profanity, is to call someone stupid.

If you call someone stupid, well, them is fighting words because we have this cumulative trauma of having our intellects insulted, that we somehow can’t do things. Now, this is where I worry, because for your audience and you, because these are the dark arts. The book is the dark arts. This is about manipulating people, it’s about conniving to get. It’s a very Machiavellian approach of the end justifies the means.

If I want people to act in a certain way, I’m thinking, “Well, how do I get that?” If I pretend that I don’t know the answer, this will jump up. If I make people feel smart, smarter than me, they’re going to like me more. And if I put myself up as I’m the great genius Justin Locke you’d think that would make everybody love me but I found it does not.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Yes.

Justin Locke
It does not.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Justin, I don’t I think there’s anything Machiavellian or dishonest or dark about that if you’re honestly acknowledge, “Hey, this is your area of strength, it’s not mine. We’re counting on you. Thank you.” And then you sort of just humbly lay that out there for what it is, I think that you may very well have a great result but it doesn’t seem dark or dishonest any way to me.

Justin Locke
Well, sometimes, yeah, the way you put it. It sounds great. You see this is my problem. I know you. You’re a nice, ethical, moral person. You would only use it in these manners. But did you want to talk about the “irregardless effect”?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it has such an intriguing title. I got to know what it means. Yes.

Justin Locke
Okay. Well, it takes us to this. Well, I wrote this play once and I used the word irregardless in the show and I was trying to explain to portray a character who wasn’t very smart – well, my own word – that he used language very poorly and he used a lot of words that weren’t words. And irregardless was just one of them, metaphoricalness was one of them, and it was just this gibberish English that came out of this person.

And people came up to me after the show, and said, “Justin, irregardless is not a word,” like I had my fly open. It was that kind of, “Justin, you’re doing something horribly shameful. You’ve got to fix that.” I’m like, “It’s a joke. Don’t you get it?” It happens so many times. I mean, it happened like 15 times, and at that point I said, “There’s something to this.”

And the point being that there are some people who have been shamed because they used the word irregardless and they got pointed at and laughed at and shamed and told they were stupid in front of their peer group when they’re eight years old and they never forgot it. And so now it’s a point that they just can’t get around.

And if you do something like that, if you make a huge mistake, people will be fascinated by mistakes. Toys ‘R Us is a perfect example of branding. That’s misspelled, that’s bad grammar and it’s misspelled. But it’s memorable.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Justin Locke
So if you are thinking of building a brand, I always tell people, “Use a misspelled word. People notice misspellings much faster than correct spelling and it’s more memorable for whatever reason.” So that’s a very good example of doing something incorrect for a good bit of space. But one of the darker applications we’ll dig back in history.

This was when Sandra Day O’Connor was a Supreme Court Justice, female, and when she retired there was a fair amount of presumption that George W. Bush would have to appoint another female justice to the Supreme Court.

Yeah, so then, okay, there’s all this political pressure and presumption that we’re going to get another female on the Supreme Court. There was a woman on his staff and I’m sure she’s very nice. Her name was Harriet Miers. She had gone to law school but I’m not sure if she ever passed the bar exam. Probably did. But she never appeared in court as a lawyer. She was just kind of, well, there’s lawyers who does contracts and stuff. Not a litigator and never had been appointed to a bench. She was not a judge and had virtually no experience as a judge. And George Bush nominates this woman to the Supreme Court of the United States.

There’s this huge uproar when this announcement was made because how could you possibly nominate this totally unqualified person? Oh, my goodness, this is terrible. And George Bush had to come up publicly and say, “Well, I’m going to have to retract my nomination, etcetera. So I’m going to nominate John Roberts instead,” who is now the Chief Justice.

Now, you can say, “Was George Bush really, really stupid that he didn’t know that people had to have…?” Because I want to think I’m smart. This is one of the basic principles. I like to feel smart. And when people really do really dumb things I like it because I get a dopamine rush of feeling superior to that dumb person, and that’s an opening for me to be manipulated.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, this is maybe the appeal behind Keeping Up With The Kardashians.

Justin Locke
You know, I don’t watch the show, but are they really obnoxious people that you can look down on?

Pete Mockaitis
I don’t watch it much myself but, I mean, these reality TV shows are often, I think, “Why do you watch that? People just seem to be making dumb decisions.” And you’re saying that’s exactly why they watch it. Dopamine for feeling superior.

Justin Locke
There it is. Yes, I mean, it makes no sense in the context of going to school, and smart is good. We should all have brilliant people all day long. But we don’t want to see that. We don’t want to listen to eggheads talking about integers. We want to see somebody, Duck Dynasty and people can’t tie their own shoes. It makes you feel superior. It makes you feel good, and that’s a principle of applied stupidity. You’ve got ratings and it’s just the truism of human nature that that’s the case.

So that’s the irregardless effect. A personal story. This is how you can use this not in a management situation. I had an editor when I was making all these hospital videos, and I would hire him. I’d just hand him the tapes that I shot and make the show. And he would just go in his little room and he would edit up the show, and he did wonderful work. But then he would call me, “Okay, I got a draft. You need to see it.” I’d come over. And then like a second minute, here’s the president of the hospital with his name spelled wrong.

I would freak out, “Oh, my God, you’ve misspelled the name of the president. Oh, my God, you’ve got to fix that.” And then he would say, “Well, did you want me to change anything else?” Well, remember the irregardless effect, it’s like a bright flashlight in a dark room. You can’t see anything. That’s the only mistake I could see because it was so big and so glaring and so horrible. And I said, “You’ve got to fix that because any other mistake was nothing in comparison.”

But you see, he did it on purpose because he didn’t want me to start picking, “Well, could you make that dissolve 30 frames instead of 20,” because I’m in a position to boss him around and pick. And people in middle management positions are always looking for some way to, we just call it rubbing their smell on the project. You want to feel like you’ve helped, and I felt like I saved the day. And every time he did this, I felt, “Oh, my God, I did my job. This could’ve been a disaster. I averted a disaster. I’ve earned my money.” But he had already made the tape with the correct spelling. He didn’t have to do it over. It was just there to stop me from meddling with his creation.

And he did this to me for years. And so, finally, I realized every time it was the same damn mistake. He’s doing this on purpose but I fell for it every time because it made me feel superior and smarter that I knew the answer and he didn’t and it saved him all kinds of troubles. So that’s another principle of applied stupidity which I think is a pretty good takeaway. There’s other ways you can do it. If you want someone to proofread something, put the word irregardless in there. And if they say, “Everything is fine,” you know they didn’t really read it.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Justin Locke
Because who would intentionally put a mistake into a draft, you ask? I would to see if you’re paying attention. So it’s this dynamic of human beings and ego and trauma, fear of embarrassment that some people have in extreme degrees, they can’t even move. And, for me, understanding and managing fear of failure has made it possible for me to do far more with my life than if I had been sitting there pondering whether I can really afford the feeling of embarrassment that I’m inviting by going to a dance class for the first time which was very hard for me to do and now it’s my whole life is going out swing dancing.

But I see this in people all the time. They’re scared to death to just risk any emotional vulnerability in public at all. And I’ll tell you, this limits your life. It really does. It really does. So that’s kind of, the book, is just all these stories that support this idea of challenging this miasma of smart and stupid, angels and devils, and just say, “Wait a minute. Do I really need to be smart?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, as you imagine, all of these principles of applied stupidity and how they play out, I think we had a nice job of setting the conceptual framework. So what would you recommend as being sort of the immediate things that you’d do if you’re a professional at work trying to harness this for good measure, what would be like the top three implementations or things you’d do right away having been enlightened with these principles?

Justin Locke
Well, one is never solve a problem, because people love to solve problems, their brains are wired to solve problems, and you don’t have to solve a problem. All you have to do is set the problem. This is what great conductors did. They never told us how to play it. They just put the music in front of us and said, “There’s the problem. You solve it.” And it’s a big ego rush to solve the problem. So you can use that need as you delegate and let other people solve the problem.

Internally, I always say, “Embrace your inner idiot.” The whole idea of perfect scores, this is unnatural, that kind of idea. And the third thing I always say to people, because I’ll ask people in Whole Foods or whatever, I said, “Do you know when you’re going to have more chocolate chip cookies?” And they will never say, “I don’t know,” because they don’t know, but they won’t say that. They’ll say, “Well, let me check. Let me confer. Let me find out.”

It’s a huge time-waster for me. I don’t want you to go and solve this problem while I stand here for 20 minutes. I just want you to know if you know. And the idea of just saying to people, “I don’t know the answer to that.” If you say to somebody, “I don’t know how to do that. I have no experience in that,” the next time they ask you something, “Do you know how to do that?” and you say, “Yes, I do know how to do that.” The fact that you told them, “I don’t know how to do something,” has created credit and believability because now, “Okay, you’re honest. You’ll tell us if you can’t do it. And if you say you can do it that means you can do it because why would you lie when you didn’t before?”

But, again, if you feel constantly like you have to present this perfect valedictorian self to the world it really doesn’t work. As a speaker, when I get up and talk, I have to really fight my school training to get up in front of the class and recite my book report and show them how smart I am, which is what I was trained at school to do, and I was constantly encouraged to do that. As a speaker I completely defer to the audience. I recognize their intelligence. This is what is rare in our culture right now is someone recognizing your ability and what you can do as opposed to seeking that recognition for yourself, and that’s what a true artist and performer does.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Thank you. Well, now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Justin Locke
I’ll quote Peter Drucker, which is, “Who is your customer and what do they find to be of value?”

Pete Mockaitis
Right on. And how about a favorite book?

Justin Locke
A favorite book? Well, this is one not many people talk about. It’s called The Secrets of Consulting by Gerald Weinberg. Are you familiar with this book?

Pete Mockaitis
No, tell me more.

Justin Locke
Gerald Weinberg is a high-tech consultant and he wrote this book on being a consultant. He really kind of, in the first 20 pages, is like really the meat of the book, but then he gets under these longer things that are, well, I won’t say filler, but they’re not as interesting. The first 18 pages or so, he’s just telling you. I like principles, as I said, I like things that work all the time, and he says things that in corporate America, giving people advice, working on teams, they work all the time.

He says, “This is just a truism of human nature.” Well, you had the guy Cialdini’s Influence, that book is kind of like… you know that book, right?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fantastic, yes.

Justin Locke
Yeah. Well, it’s kind of like that. It’s not quite research. It’s more experience-based than research-based. He has phrases like, “The further you spread the jam the thinner it gets,” and then he just explains. One of the famous phrases he said, “There’s always a tradeoff, and this applies to whatever you do.” You can pass this law to stop carbon going on the air, but this is going to happen over here. There’s always a tradeoff, there’s never anything even, and it’s just full of witty little nuggets like that that I just adore and I’d recommend it to anybody.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.

Justin Locke
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite tool?

Justin Locke
A favorite tool? Oh, the DEWALT Variable Speed 20-Volt Cordless Drill.

Pete Mockaitis
Very precise. I’ve used that before.

Justin Locke
I just bought one last month, and I want to tell you, it’s like the Millennium Falcon in my hand. Oh, God, does it work. Sorry, you asked for a tool, that’s what immediately came to mind.

Pete Mockaitis
That works great. Thank you. And how about a favorite habit?

Justin Locke
Favorite habit? Oh, I have so many bad ones. I don’t. Let’s see, a favorite habit. Just never take things at face value. Always kind of go, “Hmm, why is that?” I’ll go into stores and it’ll say fresh mackerel or fresh tuna, they’ll say it’s fresh tuna, and I’ll just say, “Well, that’s good. I hate that stale tuna. Why are you telling me it’s fresh?” It’s a useless adjective just meant to get you to buy it. Why do you call it a refrigerator? It’s just a frigerator.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s kind of cold. It maintains its coldness.

Justin Locke
Yeah, that’s right. So it’s a frigerator. Unless you take it out for a while but why would you do that? It’s a frigerator. So why do I have that? How much time human hours have been eaten up saying that extra R-E before that word? Over time it adds up. Well, I’m picky about those things. That’s a habit of mine. I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but it forces you to not just take things at face value because there’s always somebody trying to sell you something by twisting the words, you know, propaganda.

George Carlin is a great observer of that and talking about how they change shell shock to PTSD, and how we soften the language in order to make you less aware or conscious of what’s going on. So that’s a habit that I encourage people. Before you just go in there, think of, “Why am I doing this?” It’s the Toyota LEAN 5 Whys. Why are we doing that? Or why are you asking me to do that? Well, in that case, why then. It’s the 5 Whys of Toyota LEAN which is another topic for another discussion obviously, so. How’s that?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. And how about a favorite nugget, a piece that you share that tends to really resonate with folks, it gets them nodding their heads, taking notes, etcetera?

Justin Locke
I’d say, “When the going gets tough, lower your standards.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Justin Locke
Now I say, “Now, well, you should toughen up.” No, that’s a shaming thing. Go and get tough. Well, it’s your fault, your problem. Tough get going. No, just lower your standards. Maybe make it easier. You don’t have to always assume that this outside entity is correct. Maybe you need to reframe, is a wonderful phrase, I guess. When you’re in a situation that’s not working, reframe it, “Am I a victim here? Or am I in control of the situation?”

You can reframe pretty fast if you just decide to do it and understanding you have the power to do it and the choice to do it. And many people don’t realize they have that choice. So, again, it’s a consciousness thing but it works for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. Thank you. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch with you, where would you point them?

Justin Locke
My website is the key JustinLocke.com with L-O-C-K-E JustinLocke.com, and my books are Real Men Don’t Rehearse, that’s the funny Pops stories, obviously Principles of Applied Stupidity. Buy the Kindle version. The paperback, there’s a glitch in the system that I haven’t fixed, it’s too expensive but it’s only $9.99 on Kindle. And then the other two books are there but, yeah, JustinLocke.com is really the place to go, and then that fans out to everything else. I’m on Twitter and Facebook and all the rest of it.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. And do you have a parting challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Justin Locke
Well, define awesome at a job. No, I don’t. I think I’ve got put my money where my mouth is. No, I don’t have any ideas. Now, you’re on your own.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a nice finale when it comes to admitting you don’t have the answer at times and here we are all respecting you more as a result.

Justin Locke
And I did have to work very hard. I impressed the hell out of everybody, I got the job and I didn’t do anything. . . .

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. Well, Justin, thanks so much. This has been fun and I wish you lots of luck with the books and performance and fun and art and just keep on rocking.

Justin Locke
Well, Pete, keep up the good work. You have so much stuff online I couldn’t get through all of it. I was watching all your videos and everything, so you have quite the career going there. Congratulations!