It’s almost Halloween, which means it’s time to watch horror movies!
I love horror movies (now, I used to be terrified of them as a kid) and so I watch and re-watch quite a few horror movies. Especially right around Halloween.
In this episode, I dive deep into the world of horror films and uncover six surprising business lessons that can help you navigate challenges and enhance your professional journey.
From understanding the importance of kindness in building relationships to recognizing the need for thorough due diligence, I connect the dots between classic horror tropes and essential business strategies. Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting out, these lessons will not only entertain but also empower you to make smarter decisions in your professional life.
Prepare for a spooky and enlightening journey through the realm of horror movies—where survival and success hinge on more than just luck!
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Sign up to join me for the Psychological Safety Day virtual conference! I will be presenting along with a number of other amazing speakers, including Dr. Amy Edmondson! Use coupon code "Avish15" at check out to save 15%:
Unedited Transcript
Welcome to Yes And, the podcast where we explore the powerful idea of saying yes and instead of yes, but, and how you can use it in your career, your business, and your life. I'm your host, Avish Parshur, and this is Yes, And. Hello, my friend, and welcome back to Yes, and. Today, we're gonna do something a little bit different. Normally, I would either be doing an interview with someone awesome and brilliant and then tying that to yes and, or I'd be doing a solo episode where I would be going deeper into what I talked about on the interview, and maybe playing an improv game and expounding on a deeper idea around yes and. Well, this is a solo episode, but because this is Halloween time and because I really enjoy Halloween, obviously, as a kid, I loved candies. I loved getting dressed.
But really, right now, these days as an adult, Halloween, ties into my real enjoyment of horror movies. I have enjoyed horror movies for a long time, not always as you'll hear in, in this episode, but I I watch horror movies mostly year round. But around the summer, I sort of slow my role on horror movies, because I know that come, like, mid September ish through October, I'm gonna watch a lot. And because I watch a lot of Halloween, and horror movies, I got to thinking that, you know what? All of these movies have lessons that we can pull out. Not just lessons about, you know, not dying or being killed by a monster, but about life and business. So what I've done here for this very special episode, if you will, is I put together a list of 6 business lessons that you can learn from horror movies.
Now I know it may seem weird with my area of expertise, of improv comedy. Like, what does improv comedy have to do with horror? Well, nothing. Although, I will let you in on a little anecdote is that a number of years ago, I was in an improv group. Gosh. This is about 30 years ago. I was in an improv group, and our very first show we did, I wasn't running it.
The very first show we did was a pretty normal improv comedy show. The second show we did, though, the people running it decided they wanted to do improv horror. Yeah. No. No. I'm not saying it was an improv comedy horror. I'm not saying it was a spoof or a parody.
I'm saying it was literally improv horror. Now I'm not saying it's impossible to do that, but it's very challenging. You needed more practice, more breakdown, more kinda understanding of the genre.
So we did it. It, didn't really work, and that group didn't last much longer. So improv comedy and horror may not have a lot to do with each other. But in addition to doing improv for 30 years, I have spoken to professionals and businesses for, over 20. So we're not gonna go so much into the improv on this one, but we are gonna talk a bit about yes and and, really about business lessons from horror movies. Before we get to that, I wanna mention something that is a tiny bit time sensitive. I am going to be participating in a virtual conference called psychological safety day.
That is going to be done virtually on November 20th. Now if you're not familiar with psychological safety, it is this concept pioneered by doctor Amy Edmonson. And, basically, they did a study. There there's a few things that go into this, but they've done studies about what makes teams the highest performing. What's the common trait amongst highest performing teams? And what they found is the highest trait, far and away, is psychological safety, and that is simply the belief that if if someone on the team voices an idea, a question, or a concern, that they will be met with support, not criticism. And it's also that if you take a risk, you'll be met with positivity and support as opposed to being berated and criticized.
So it's basically feeling safe in your team. I've talked about this myself, and I'm gonna do a whole program, a breakout session or, like, a a session on this virtual for about 30 minutes talking about yes and and psychological safety. And the cool thing about this event is doctor Amy Edmonson is going to be the keynote speaker. So if you're interested in learning more about psychological safety, go to avishpartnersher.comforward/safety. And if when you register, you use the code avish 15, that's avish15, you can get 15% off your registration. So it's a great idea if you're a leader, if you run an organization, or if you just wanna learn how to if you work in HR or you just wanna learn how to build stronger teams, this is a great event. It's virtual.
You can do it from anywhere. It's gonna be from 11 to 4 EST. Go to avishparsher.comforward/safety and enter the code avish 15. Now on with the episode. The first business lesson that we can learn from horror movies is real simple. It is to be nice. Yes. To be nice.
Seems simplistic, but think about it. In the horror movie, generally, one person survived that or not depending on the tone of the horror movie. Usually, at most, one person survives.
That's the final girl. Now in general, two things happen here. Number 1, the final girl is usually the nice one. Right? Most horror movies have a bunch of stereotypical characters, and the main character, whether it's a a male or female, is the the trope term is final girl. The main character we are following, for the most part, either begins nice or ends up nice. Right? Usually, it's a character we wanna root for, so they make it someone nice, positive.
The stereotypical characters, there's usually, like, a dumb jock who's, like, rude and mean to everyone. Sometimes there's a ditzy girl who's rude and mean to everyone. They always get offed. And in a rare occasion, you'll have a horror movie like happy death day, where the main character starts off really mean, but over the course of the movie, we relate to them. They become nicer and kinder. And once in a while, it's not even necessarily the final girl, but someone who survives, is not the final girl. For example, in Carrie, the the classic Stephen King novel and movie, the only person who survived that movie was, Amy Irving, was the actress, was Carrie's friend.
The only person who was kind to Carrie is the one who survived. And I think this is a great lesson we can take. It's just the importance of being nice and being kind. Now at the time of this episode, if you go back to the last two episodes, they were all about kindness. I interviewed kindness speaker, MJ Shar, and we talked all about kindness. And in my solo episode, I broke it down further, talking about kindness and emotions and how that drives content. So go check those out.
But really think about it. If you are a if you're delivering customer service, you wanna be kind, you wanna be nice. It's not just about solving the customer's problems. It's about the attitude and emotion you're doing, when you do that. Right? We've all been there before where you've, gotten help from someone, say, in a customer service, environment and they solve your problem or got you what you wanted, but they did it with an attitude. And even though they did what you wanted, you still left with a bit of a sour taste taste in your mouth.
So if you wanna improve customer loyalty, customer experience, word-of-mouth, it's real simple. It costs no money. Be nice. Make sure employers are being nice. This obviously also works for internal whether you're talking about coworkers or as a leader. Now this doesn't mean you have to be soft or a pushover, but just be nice. And if you think this is too squishy, think about companies like Zappos, who put such a a premium on customer service and being nice and helpful no matter what, doing whatever they could to be helpful.
And look how much they grew. And I gotta tell you, if you wanna have a lasting impact and make memories, being kind is amazing. I mentioned at the top of this that I didn't always like horror movies. And when I was young, I hated them. They used to give me nightmares. They weren't even giving me nightmares, actually, because once I was asleep, I was asleep, but it made it impossible for me to sleep. I saw anything scary, TV show, movie, whatever, I would just not be able to fall asleep.
So I avoided horror movies. And then one day, when I was about 10 years old, we had some family friends come and stay with us. And there's they're there for, like, a week. And so one night, we're like, hey. Let's go see a movie. Everyone wanted to see a movie. And everyone else amongst this group, including my sister and all the friends who were there, they all liked horror movies.
And at this time, Cujo was a new release. Again, going back to Stephen King, Cujo was a Stephen King book and movie. And the commercials really made Cujo look scary. Right? And Stephen King, of course, it's a horror movie, and I did not wanna see this. I didn't wanna see any horror movie. But everyone's pushing, and that's what they wanted to see.
And I felt this, like, awkwardness and this pressure. But, eventually, the the fear just overcame me, and I'm like, I can't do it.
You guys go. That's fine. I'll stay home. And I was only 10 years old, so I didn't say it with the maturity of I would do it now. Like, oh, that's fine. I'll find something else too. I was bummed.
I felt sad, and I also felt a little embarrassed. Like, a lot of the family friends were my age, and they were fine with horror movies, but I was not able to do it. So I was embarrassed and sad that I was missing out on this movie experience. Well, as everyone's getting ready to go to the movie, my dad comes to me, and he's like, do you wanna go see a different movie? I was like, wow. Yes. I I do.
And the movie I had wanted to see, which no one else did, understandably, was this horrible eighties movie called metal storm in 3 d, the destruction of Jared sin. Now in retrospect, that is a horrible movie. People put it on their worst movies of all time list, so it was really, really bad. But at the time, to my 10 year old mind, the commercials made it look awesome. It was like post apocalyptic action movie, everything I loved. And so my dad though was like, do you want me to take you to see that? I was like, yeah.
That would be great. So everyone went to the movie, and then my dad took me separately. While they were going to see Cujo, he took me separately to see metal storm. And it just made me feel so good. It was a moment with my dad. It made me feel like I wasn't missing out anymore. I got to do something fun and not miss out while everyone else was doing something fun.
And that memory, this was 31 years ago. No. Gosh. 41 year. Wow. I'm older than I thought. 41 years ago. And I still remember it to this day.
That is the lasting power of kindness. I bet right now you could probably think back to a strong, profound memory of a time someone treated you with kindness, and I would have a lasting impact. So whether it's in business or in life, if you want to have a profound impact, improve relationships, improve service, improve culture, real rapport, be kind, and be nice. So let me ask you. Do you default to niceness? Do you default to a kind response even when you're feeling stressed or pressed for time? Take that pause next time you're in an interaction and ask myself, can I be nice?
Can I be kind? You can make a huge world of difference and have a lasting impact. 2nd lesson from horror movies is to understand the enemy. You gotta know what you're up again to up against if you wanna survive a horror movie. Right? For example, in some horror movies, one of the characters will decide that they're going to fight the monster. One of the most classic examples of this and most hilarious examples of this is in Friday 13th, Jason Takes Manhattan.
Technically, I believe it's called Jason, 8. I don't know. But whatever it is, it's the one where, it's supposed to be Jason Takes Manhattan. Of course, most of the movie takes place on a boat and only last 20 or 30 minutes or so. We're actually in Manhattan. But there's a scene towards the end of the movie where the one character who earlier we had seen boxing and sparring faces Jason on a rooftop. And instead of running away, he decides he's gonna fight Jason.
So he boxes Jason. He's a great boxer.
And he punches and punches and punches. And Jason, if you're unfamiliar, is basically a supernatural being who cannot be hurt or damaged. And he just takes all these punches over and over and over again, until the boxer is exhausted. And he drops his guard exhausted and is like, alright. Go ahead. Take your best shot. And, in one of the most hilarious scenes, not only in the Friday 13th series, but in the entire, horror movie genre is Jason punches him, and one punch just knocks off his head, ending this man's life.
And you'll see this in other movies too. There was a Nightmare on Elm Street movie where one of the characters, was a martial artist, and in his dreams, he fights Freddy in a martial arts dojo. And, of course, these characters always lose because they didn't understand the enemy. You might be great at boxing, but you're not gonna defeat Jason that way. You gotta understand your enemy. Now what is it less than what is our business lesson? Well, you gotta understand your competition.
You have to know what you're up against in the marketplace. Right? Just like underestimating Jason leads to defeat, underestimating not understanding your competition can lead to business failure or struggle. I look at companies like MySpace or Facebook. Right? MySpace started first, and then Facebook came up and had all these little different features, whereas Myspace was focusing on the, you know, posting of music and pictures. Facebook added this social interaction piece, which, really sort of defeated Myspace. Right? Facebook replaced them.
And then if you recall, this is a while ago. If you're younger, you might not remember this. But Facebook was, like, on top, and then Twitter came up. And Twitter just started getting all this attraction and user base and market share. And if you recall, before Twitter, Facebook didn't have the news feed, and then Facebook changed their model to adapt. Right? They understood their enemy.
They said, wow. Look at what's coming up here.
We gotta change. And the Facebook news feed really changed to mimic the the Twitter, feed. And I remember when it happened, I was like, this is so dumb. Facebook's trying to be like Twitter. I hate this. And now that's what keeps me coming back. So in business, one company did understand the competition and changed their approach.
The other didn't. 1 basically went out of business. The other is one of the largest companies in the world now. And, you know, I I face this myself as a speaker. Right? For a long time when I started out, I didn't understand my strength, number 1. I knew I did improv comedy and that was unique, But I was getting advice from people saying, oh, no. No.
You don't wanna put improv in your marketing. That's gonna scare potential clients. Right? They don't know what you're gonna do, or no one wants to train their people to improvise. I would never speak on that. And this got really in my head. So in my early marketing, I downplayed improvisation and improv comedy.
And I tried to focus on what others do, which is, just give great content. So there's 2 lessons here that really helped my business. Number 1, I realized that my competitor strength, the other speakers, they had a lot more experience in the business world. Right? They had some of them or some life experiences. Right? Like, some of them have been CEOs of companies.
Others had climbed Mount Everest, and I didn't have any of that. I couldn't compete with that. But by trying to downplay the improv, I was trying to compete with that, and it just wasn't working. And it was when I said, you know what? My Mount Everest or my CEO ness is an improv. And, yeah, it might turn some people off, but that's my strength. So I need to understand what is their strength.
I can't compete with that. Let me pivot. Number 2, the one thing I could compete with is kinda like Facebook did with Twitter is they did a lot of storytelling and told really captivating stories. And in my early days as a speaker, I didn't really tell any stories. I just played improv games and pull lessons from them, and I thought that was great. But when I realized, wow, this is what my competition's doing, and this is what the audience expects. So I need to do more of that.
So I started and still to this day, I'm working on my storytelling. Right? Just like Facebook was like, oh, here's what Twitter is doing. Can we do that? Now I'm like, oh, this is what other speakers are doing. Let me see how I can adapt that to my own model. So I still do improv.
It's still unique, but I'm weaving in those things my competition does as well in a way that also lets me be on the same level as them. So here's what you can do. If you are in a business, understand these 2 things. Number 1, what are your competitors strengths?
Number 2, what are your strengths? So then look at your competitors strengths and figure out how does that affect your strengths? How does it compare to you? And how can you position yourself to either differentiate from their strengths or compete on their level? The one thing you don't wanna do is just ignore it. Lesson number 3 from horror movies is to finish the job. It is amazing to me in how many movies the protagonist has the villain on the ropes.
The villain is down, knocked out, staggered. And instead of finishing the job, they just sort of leave it and run away. Right. One of the biggest examples of this is in the movie Scream. Right? This in Scream, the interesting thing about the Scream franchise, sorry to spoil this from 30 years ago, but the interesting thing about Scream is that the villain is human.
He's not supernatural. Right? In none of the movies is there any kind of supernatural level like there is in Friday 13th or Halloween. It's just a person. And the number of times that one of the victims knocks down the killer or almost knocks them out and then doesn't press that advantage. They don't finish the job. They just leave them.
In the first one, they just run away. In the second one, they don't do anything other than just try to take their mask off, which was really silly. And you'll see this in other movies too, like Wolf Creek, where they've got the villain down, and then they just don't finish the job. Now it's easy for me to say not being in a horror movie. I'm sort of advocating that, oh, the victim should just, you know, kill the villain, which alright. I understand in that moment. Maybe it's a tough decision.
But the lesson there is if they did, if they finished the job, they would have survived. And I think this happens a lot in the real world and in business. We as individuals or a bit as businesses, number 1, get complacent. When things start rolling well for us, we don't double down. We don't push forward.
We just coast. Or the second thing on a more individual level is it's not uncommon, to start a project with energy and enthusiasm. But then as time goes on, either because we get distracted by other things or we feel like we're losing momentum, we just sort of give up and that project, sails off. So for example, on the business side, you know, look at a company like Yahoo, which at one point was the largest search engine in the world, had this dominance, and they really could have maintained their dominance. In fact, a a famous story is they could have bought Google, for not a I forgot what the number was.
It was like $1,000,000 or something. It wasn't a huge amount of money at the time. And Yahoo could have done that, but they did. They're like, ah, what's his Google gonna be? They but even if you're not sure what the competition is gonna be, they could have maintained their dominance just by buying up their competition. Right? Yahoo could be Google right now, but they didn't finish the job.
They just coasted on their success assuming, oh, things will always be good. They didn't finish the job. So that's on a business side. Don't coast. You gotta keep innovating, keep maintaining, and keep pushing forward to maintain your market dominance. Number 2, on a personal level, this might be more for individuals or entrepreneurs if you are an entrepreneur or solo business owner, like I am where I kinda run my own business. I I'm guilty of this.
I have a lot of projects that I have started that, were really good ideas. But because they took a little bit longer than anticipated, and then life happened, and I got distracted, or I didn't get the results I I initially thought I would get. I just sort of lost momentum, and this it trailed off. Right? I have multiple things on my hard drive right now that are anywhere from 50 to 75% done. I've got a cool lead magnet. I've got a course idea, a product idea.
I've got a new idea for a keynote. And, you know, starting is not easy. I'm not gonna say starting is easy. It's not. And in fact, one of the messages in my presentations is about the importance of getting started and how most of us don't start, because we wanna have it all figured out. So starting is important. But once you started, what is as hard if not harder is carrying things through to the finish.
Press your advantage and keep pushing till you're done. I need to apply this message to myself. I'm gonna get back and finish some of these projects. The biggest one is a novel has been my dream. Writing a novel has been my dream for over around 40 years, and, I finally finished draft 1. I finally finished. But finishing draft 1 is not finishing the novel, and that has been sitting on my hard drive for 3 months.
Gosh, almost 4 months now, and I've just been procrastinating the editing process. So this podcast is gonna be a kick in my own butt to get back on that and finish the job. So let me ask you, what do you need to finish right now? What is that project that you're in the middle of, that endeavor, that goal that you reach a certain point and you've lost a little momentum, you've lost some interest, you're the doubts are creeping in. What do you need to finish? Whether it works the way you want it or not, whether it succeeds to the level you hoped, finishing the job is so important in horror movies, and finishing the job is so important in our prefer personal and professional lives. Lesson number 4 from horror movies is to think big picture.
One of my favorite movies of all time, not just horror movies, but all movies ever is Jaws. Now you could make an interesting case. Is Jaws a horror movie? Now, obviously, when it came out, it was terrifying. It scared people from the water, but I saw it on video. I saw it when I was younger, years after the movie had come out, and it had its moments of being scary. But to me, it's more of like a thrilling action movie than a horror movie.
But because if you go to a video store or, I guess, gosh, I don't know if there are video stores anymore dating myself, if you look on Netflix or whatnot, you'll usually find Jaws in the horror category. So for the purpose of this podcast, yes, we'll call Jaws a horror movie. So in the movie, this the shark terrorizes this, town, Amityville, New York, And the mayor has the option of closing the beaches so they can kill the shark or let it go away. And he opts to keep it open because what he's thinking about is the short term benefit of keeping the beaches open for the, financial ramifications for the town. Right? It was 4th July. If they're closed for a week, it's like months for them.
So now it's a tough decision for the mayor, but he was thinking little picture, not big picture. He was saying, oh my god. These people need their money right now. So let's just not worry about it. We'll deal with the sharp problem. We're gonna open the beaches. Now, of course, we know what happens. People die. Everyone's terrorized.
No one wants to go in the water. Anyways, he didn't think about the big picture, which is, number 1, if we close it for the short term pain, it's gonna be better in the long term because what kind of reputation is this town gonna have? I mean, number 1, the cost of a human life is higher than any kind of financial cost. Number 2, what's the financial cost gonna be the reputation of the town if there is a shark attack? So and you'll see this all the time. Right? Horror movies basically work because some characters, not necessarily the protagonist, but because some characters are making dumb short term decisions without thinking about the long term. Right? Like, oh, I need this a little bit of money, so let me do this, or let me go back inside, to go check on something instead of just leaving it. Right? You can go on and on with a lot of movies where people make stupid short term decisions, not thinking about the big picture.
And the same is true, in the long term. Right? When we think only short term, it can hurt long term success. Now this is hard, because sometimes your short term is very pressing, and it's very stressful stressful. And maybe we're going through tough times. So all we can focus on is just getting through this day, getting through this week, getting through this quarter. But if you're only ever doing that, you're never gonna get off the overwhelmed treadmill. Right? This is what leads to burnout.
This is what leads to stress. And this is what leads us getting passed because while we're so busy past sorry. This is what leads to us getting passed. Because if we're so busy focused on the short term, we're missing our competition passing us in the long term. Right? Now consider, this is basically the Eisenhower matrix. You've probably seen this maybe in Stephen Covey's, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, where he talks about how you can categorize all your activities as important or not important, and urgent or not urgent.
Which then creates 4 categories. Right? Some things not urgent and not important. It's urgent and not important. It's not it's not urgent, but it is important. Or it is both important and urgent. And the point that Eisenhower and Covey were making in these is that we need to spend time focusing on the category of items that are important but not urgent.
Because the urgent, whether it's urgent and important or urgent and not important, will suck us in. Now obviously, you have to do the urgent and important stuff. But we need to carve out time to focus on the stuff that's important, but not urgent, because that's what's gonna be the big picture, the longer term stuff. Right? So I'll give you a business example for myself. I get caught up in this all the time. I have financial goals.
I have a monthly goal of speaking business that I want to book. And what happens is especially when things get a little tough as they do. It's a cyclical business that goes up and down. If I have a goal of x dollars, I get very focused on what do I need to do to make x dollars this month. Now that is a fine focus. Right? That is important and urgent.
The problem is there's a second question I should be asking, and that is not how do I make x dollars this month. It's how do I make X dollars in a month that is 3 months or 6 months or 1 year away in a way that is much easier than I'm making now. Now let me repeat that. How can I make x dollars now versus how can I make x dollars 6 months from now in a way that is much easier? Now that's short term small picture versus long term big picture. So for example, if I wanna make X dollars this month, what am I gonna do? Well, I can make cold calls, cold emails.
I can reach out to past clients. Right? I can do lots of those types of activities. And if I hustle enough, I can hit my monthly target. But I'm gonna have to do that every month, and that's gonna get exhausting. And I've had this happen before where then it just stops working for a bit and it gets very stressful. But if in addition to that important and urgent question, I ask myself the important but not urgent question.
6 months from now, in March of 2025, how can I hit my number, my financial number? What can I do now? Tell me reach my financial number more easily 6 months from now. Now that might look like doing things like this podcast, right, building a platform. That could be working on a new book. That could be putting in the time to network and build relationships that will pay off later. It's all stuff that is not gonna pay off right now, but might pay off in the future.
So this is the question for you. Number 1, do you know what your big picture is? It's so easy to get caught up in the today and the now that we forget to even think about. What's our big picture? What are those goals? And number 2, what are you doing today? What activities are you taking today to hit those long term big picture goals?
They're not just gonna happen. They're gonna get procrastinated. So carve out time every day or every week to work on those big picture goals, so you don't end up like the mayor of jaws making stupid short term decisions. Lesson number 5 from horror movies is to be prepared. One of the biggest tropes from horror movies is when something unexpectedly goes wrong that makes it impossible for the main character or characters, the victims, to get away or get help. The 2 most common tropes of this is number 1, the car breaking down, but it won't start. I definitely seen this in Friday 13th, I think part 2, but it's been in a ton of movies. Right? The person gets in their car, and, they're they're about to get away.
They get they make it to their car, but then they go to turn the car on, and it won't work. Right? Oh, speaking of Cujo. Right? This is one of the entire premises of Cujo is the mom and the son can't get away because their car breaks down at the house where this dog is. The more modern version is a you know, now that everyone has cell phones, it seems almost ridiculous that someone can't call for help. So every horror movie has to have this, like, weird situation about why they can't use their cell phone.
And the most hackneyed and kind of cop out one is the cell battery just dying. Oh, I'm on a cell phone charge. I can't call for help. More modern movies are getting a bit more clever about this, but now both of these things, car breaking down cell phone, is really about the character not being prepared. Right? If your car is not working, get it fixed. Right? There are warning signs to let you know my car is having trouble.
Let me take it. Let me be prepared. Especially, if I'm gonna go away to a place like a remote cabin in the woods. Let me fix my car or cell phone. Hey. You know what? I'm gonna be away for a bit. Let me charge my cell phone. Let me make sure it's got a full charge. Right? Little things to be prepared.
And in all of these movies, they'll foreshadow it. So in an earlier scene with the car, you'll see someone where the car won't quite start. So it's not like a totally unexpected, interruption to this problem. It's something they knew about and they could have handled earlier. And in business, it's the same thing, the importance of being preparation. Right? Whether it's being prepared for a sales meeting or objection or having backup plans when you have an event or presentation or just getting, you know, having your problem solve having your small problem solved in advance, so they don't become big problems.
And if you don't solve these little problems early, they can balloon to big problems later. Right? Like, for example, I think there was an issue with the Volvo where they had a a safety issue with their car. And rather than fixing it early, they didn't catch it till later. They let it go, and then they basically lied in their testing results, which caused a much bigger problem down the road. Similarly, Samsung had a problem with their batteries that would burn and cause a huge problem for their users. And, again, rather than solving these problems and dealing with them early, they let them go until they became much, much bigger problems.
And it's sort of ironic talking about the car battery. As I'm preaching about the importance of taking care of things. I had an issue sort of similar to this in that, my car was having an issue. I got in my car, and it went to turn on, and it didn't start. Like, it made a little battery noise. And I paused and tried again, and this time it did come on.
Like, oh, great. Now, of course, in my head, I'm like, cars don't randomly not start. I should probably get that looked at. But, hey, it's working now, so let me ignore it. And And I did ignore it for a couple weeks. Then I went downtown to a meeting I had, and I parked in a parking garage. Now I got lucky because when I got out of my car, I noticed that my car was maybe forward a foot or 2 too much.
It probably would have been fine, but I'm like, let me just fix this. So I get back in my car and turn it on, and it doesn't start. I'm like, uh-oh. Maybe this is like that last time where if I just wait a minute and try again, it'll work.
But guess what? It didn't. I tried over and over again, and it didn't start. I was like, oh my god. Now rather than being at my house like I was the first time, I was in a downtown Philly garage. Like, oh, it's gonna be so hard. Well, I had a meeting to get to, so I'm like, I can't deal with this now.
I'll deal with it after my meeting. So I went to the meeting. It was fine. I came back, and I got my card. I was like, oh, please work. And fortunately for me, the car started. And the car started.
I'm like, oh my god. And so I called the my local mechanic. I'm like, hey. I am bringing my car to you right now. So then I got it fixed. Now I got incredibly lucky the car started the second time. But just like these horror movie people, had a little problem.
And instead of being prepared and dealing with it, I ignored it. And the small problem almost ballooned into a giant problem.
So let's talk about you. What is the warning sign you're ignoring? Right? Now it could be something like a car battery, but it could be something in the market. Right? Kinda like going to the early stories. It could be like a competitor that's coming up that you're like, it's probably gonna be okay.
Let's not worry about it. It could be something in your industry or it could be something in your organization. You know, a little bit of grumbling, a little bit of discontent amongst 1 or some of the employees that you're like, yeah, maybe it'll go away. Those things never go away. And if you don't deal with it now, if you don't prepare yourself for it now, it's gonna get much worse in the future. What action can you take now to deal with these problems and prepare for the future before everything balloons out of control? Alright. The 6th and final lesson from horror movies is to do your due diligence.
There is a subgenre of horror movies where basically the entire reason the horrible actions of the movie can happen is because people don't fully do their due diligence. This is movies like the hand that rocks the cradle or the orphan, where there's, like, a mysterious person. And instead of doing a full background check or investigating things fully, the main character's like, oh, it's fine. Right? Or they try a little bit to do their due diligence, but they got a little bit of a runaround. And instead of waiting until they are sure, they just move forward. And then when they do find out it's way later in the movie, now everything's too late.
People have died. It's all terrible. So we, as business people and professionals, need to do our due diligence as well. The most obvious one is in hiring, but this cost will be in buying, investing in a new software package or moving into a new, market share or whatever it is. Right? If we just jump in without doing our due diligence, we make giant mistakes. And you've seen huge ones in the world and in the news in the relative recent past. Right? Theranos. I just read the book bad blood and watched the documentary about Elizabeth Holmes and her company Theranos.
There's the blood testing one that essentially was a giant fraud. But when it came out, everyone was so enamored with her and the messages she was sending that no one did their due diligence. They didn't wanna miss out, so they just jumped in and invested. And people lost a ton of money when it all came out that it was a fraud.
Similarly, Bernie Madoff. Right? Bernie Madoff was the same thing. He just claimed proprietary information. Everyone's like, look at his amazing results he's getting. It makes no sense. There's no way this can be happening, but I don't wanna miss out.
So let me just jump in without doing due diligence. You know, I watched the Bernie Madoff, like, documentary. It was like a documovie on Netflix. And, you know, at one point, a regulator attempted to do due diligence. And what did they do? They called Bernie Madoff up and just asked him. Hey. What's going on here?
And he's like, oh, it's fine. It's this, this, and this. He just lied to them. And the regulator was like, oh, okay. Thanks. Now that's ridiculous. Right? That's not due diligence.
That's pretending to do due diligence. So this can happen on the highest levels. So you don't wanna get stuck into this. Now I wanna if you've seen me speak, you know one of the big things I talk about is the importance of taking action. So this might seem like the opposite message. Wait. Doing due diligence?
You know, I even talk about it in my keynotes. Like, everyone's waiting to have all their ducks in a row before they take action, and you gotta just start. It might seem like this is the opposite. Right now, I'm saying, no. You have to have your ducks in a row. Well, the difference here is when I talk about taking action in my improv keynote, I'm talking about taking small action. One little step. I'm not taking talking about taking a giant action.
I'm not talking about investing 100 of $1,000,000 or all of your savings. Right? I'm talking about taking a little step. You know, maybe investing a tiny bit of money, testing something out and seeing. Right? In fact, in an improv context, the small step is how you do the due diligence. Right? Instead of doing all this research and taking weeks months years to think about it, you take a little step and see what happens.
And does it work? Alright. Well, take another little step. And so we have to balance due diligence from action. And the big way to do that is think about how much am I risking versus how big a step am I taking? You know, the importance of improv is we play with house money. In an improv scene, there's almost no consequence to failure in an improv comedy show other than maybe not making the audience laugh and looking a little bad.
And that's fine. You learn in improv. That's a small price, and the upside is huge. The higher the the cost, you need to do one of 2 things. You either need to do more due diligence or lower the risk and the size of step so you can learn more and move forward. So let me ask you a question. What is your due diligence process? Right? What what are you doing to make sure that you're not getting yourself into a bad situation?
Or flip that around in the improv style, how can you mitigate the risk? So you're taking a smaller step, so you can do your learning that way. Alright. You do that. You won't make these mistakes. These crazy horror movie victims do. Alright. So those are the 6 lessons, that you can learn about business from horror movies.
I would love to get your input on this. Comment either on the social media post that you saw this on or, on my blog post for this, which I will link to in the show notes. But yeah. And if you're not a subscriber, please subscribe. And if you like this, if you wanna share the Halloween love and spirit while also sharing some great business lessons, please share the link to this podcast. You can share the link from your podcast app or share the link
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Thanks for listening, and I will see you next week on Yes, Ang.