WonderTour

Hello and welcome to Lead Wisely by WonderTour.

We are currently in the middle of our series called Trust the Process on coaching and
mentoring styles of leadership.

today we're going to of course go with a sports movie supporting this theme.

We are talking about the Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank movie, Million Dollar Baby from
2004.

Multi award winning, beloved.

little bit heavier than our usual fare.

There are no space wizards involved in this one, but there is some real emotional weight
to it, which I think will be useful for us to talk about.

These are real things.

So we are going to start right off with a tough question about leadership.

Drew, how do you pursue extraordinary goals when you don't have superpowers?

It's a fun question for this movie, Brian, because we see Maggie Fitzgerald, Hilary
Swank's character, right from the beginning.

I mean, she tells us that she's nothing.

She says that she's like, I'm garbage.

I'm 32 years old and I've done nothing with my life.

She gives us all these reasons why she's nothing.

But she has this one thing.

And this one thing is that she loves to fight and she can get motivated by that.

She's really passionate about it.

So as we discussed, what do do when you don't have any superpowers?

Well, I think that's kind of where Maggie starts out at.

She doesn't have any superpowers.

And I think that's more so what it's like in life for each one of us, because it's not
like we're looking around and we're like, I have the force, right?

Or I have this superpower that Gandalf has a vision where he can just see the future and
see, you know, see the whole land all at once.

It's not like that.

Instead, it's more like

you know, even where I do have really great strengths and we call them leadership
superpowers, Brian, right?

I might have, and you might have a leadership superpower in communication or something
like that.

That's great.

But that's something that's developed over time and that we're constantly getting better
at.

It's not like we just like plug in and we have this, you know, I can sling webs for my
hands.

So I want to talk about what do you do when you don't have a superpower?

And this whole episode, we're going to talk about mindset.

Because we're in a series on trust the process.

And if you're going to trust the process, if you're going to continue to put one foot in
front of the other, do 1 % a day, whatever the analogy is for you, then it starts with

mindset.

Because a mindset is a superpower that any of us can have, but mindsets have to be
cultivated.

We have to build up a way of viewing the world, a lens by which we view reality.

that allows us to be able to take that next step every single day, to be able to do the
next big thing, to be able to build up our capacity for greatness.

And that's what we see with Maggie Fitzgerald in Million Dollar Baby.

Her greatness, it's not that she is born of a great family.

It's not that she has even some physical skill set that's necessarily better than
everybody else's.

Her greatness,

is that she wakes up every day and she puts forth effort, right?

And when Clint Eastwood, Frankie tells her not to show up this weekend, she shows up
anyway at the gym that weekend.

Because for her, it's about putting forth effort.

It's about making sure that even if today I'm working at the diner making minimum wage,

I still continue to cultivate and reframe my mindset towards something bigger.

I'm aligned to a bigger mission.

I believe that if I just do this little bit and then that next little bit and then that
next little bit, that slowly but surely I'm moving the pile of sand.

Right.

No, that's really good.

And I, as I'm thinking about this, you talked about alignment in there.

You talked about belief in there.

I came into this and I was going to try to describe her with maybe persistence, but I
think that's a little thin, right?

I think alignment is positioning belief is internal, but it's kind of static.

Persistence is insufficient.

think, I think what we're talking about here is commitment.

Right?

Is that she is willing to prioritize achieving this goal, becoming a great fighter over
literally everything else, starting from nothing, starting from not knowing how to be a

great fighter, starting from not having any resources as all at all to speak of.

but she has this incredible commitment of like, I'm willing to put it all on the table in
service of this goal.

And I want to suggest maybe that's her superpower, the superpower of commitment.

And so there's some, there's some really great scenes in there.

Like you say, in this movie where we see her demonstrating that in a bunch of different
ways.

But from Frankie's view as the leader, right?

When you see that, when you see somebody who is coming in that is presently incompetent,
but it's clearly committed, right?

And you can't see that in one instance.

You have to see that over time.

She's working out at his gym for like six months before he even wanted to talk to her.

Right.

But when you see that commitment,

then maybe you start to notice like, okay, now I believe this person could get through the
inevitable pain, the inevitable frustration, the inevitable failures to really accomplish

something.

Yeah.

And one other thing, speaking of Frankie, that Maggie does is with that commitment that
she has with that persistence is she goes and finds a mentor.

She finds somebody who she believes knows how to actually do the thing that she wants to
do.

Because we find out that for three years she's already been boxing.

She's already been practicing.

But when she shows up and we see scraps Morgan Freeman's character,

And Frankie, they're like, okay, she shows a little bit of potential.

Definitely Scraps believes that, but she has no form.

She has no structure to what she's doing.

She's missing some of the most basic things about boxing because nobody's ever taught them
to her.

But to her credit, she reflects and she figures that out.

And she knows that it's not just going to the gym every day and wanting it more.

It's not just the effort that she has to put in.

to punch the bag, it's also the effort that she has to put in in every other facet of her
life in order to achieve this mission.

She's committed to not just getting better, but to finding somebody who can push her and
who can teach her to get better in a way that she's not capable of doing herself.

So commitment is a superpower.

Commitment is insufficient, right?

You also need expertise.

You need skill.

You need competence, right?

And competence is not just about the big things, right?

Competence is in the details of like, you lean on your right toe when you're doing this
maneuver and you circle this way and you hold your hands this way and you hold your head

this way.

Like there's all of these nuances that go into competence and you can't get those by
staring at a bag.

You can't get those by figuring it out yourself from first principles, or at least that's
probably not the efficient way to get there.

And so her other insight, I think, you the other thing that Maggie is good at here is
she's like, she's willing to learn and a hundred percent aware that what she needs is the

expertise, that she needs to find somebody who can teach a championship level fighter.

Okay, so Maggie has this mindset, Brian, that allows her to be committed and to put forth
that daily effort that she needs to in order to eventually be successful.

When we come back, I want to talk about, you know, how does she get that mindset and how
can we leverage that same mindset to accomplish the mission that or the mission or the

dream that we have in our own heads?

Hi, I'm Brian Notwell.

And we are on a journey to lead wisely, to become better leaders by touring fantastic
worlds and inspiring lore by going on a WonderTour.

We connect leadership concepts to story context because it sticks to our brains better.

You can find out more at wondertourpodcast.com or by searching Lead Wisely on YouTube

Okay, so we've got Maggie.

She has the superpower of commitment.

She has a clear goal in mind.

She recognizes her need for a mentor, for expertise.

Why does she pick Frankie?

Why do think she's in this gym hassling him to be the one person that she'll trust to take
her there?

Yeah, and just like all things with this movie, we don't get clear answers to most of the
questions.

There's not a lot of backstory.

There's not a lot of alluding to what has previously happened.

We just see that initial fight there with Big Willie and she just Maggie just shows up
afterwards and she wants Frankie to teach her.

So clearly she's been eyeing him and she sees something in him that she likes.

But I think it's.

She sees this alignment with what she wants.

She sees this grit and persistence and integrity that Frankie has, and she believes that
if he would apply that to me, then I also could be successful.

So she's identified, you know, this is a leader, this is the coach that I want because
he's successfully coached other people.

He clearly has the expertise.

This person can get me where I want to go.

Right.

So after months of persistence, she does eventually break him down.

She does eventually get to, you know, get him to agree to be her trainer.

And she turns out to be.

I don't know that a natural is the right word, but she's very successful, right?

She's got whatever it takes to go through the pain of being a, being a fighter, and to
become very successful.

And we gets this fabulous training montage followed by this fabulous rise through the
ranks montage of her,

winning a number of fights by early round knockouts.

If you love boxing movies, this is amazing.

If you think boxing is immoral, this is a little uncomfortable, but it's very well done.

It's really fun to watch and we're really engaged with Maggie's rise to the ranks here.

So I wanna talk about a little bit about Maggie's character.

What is it that allows her to be successful despite her...

surroundings despite her upbringing, despite her background.

And I think one way to do that might be to sort of contrast with her family who we get to
see a couple of times in this movie.

So do you want to bring us into our mountaintop moment here that sort of illustrates the,
you know, the thematic elements?

Yeah, and I think this is the perfect time to bring in just a short definition of what the
growth mindset is as we settle into the mountaintop here.

So when we talk about the growth mindset, I hear a lot of people say the words growth and
mindset together and they mean many different things by them.

We are looking at Carol Dweck's kind of seminal work on the growth mindset.

Very, very important here.

She develops this idea through different clinical studies of

the kind of central point of the growth mindset is I have the ability to gain skill to get
better at something as long as I believe that I do.

You know, I continue to, it is my belief in that thing and getting better at it and then
acting on that belief that allows me to get better at it.

And that's great.

And that sounds like a fraction of humanism and many other things, right?

That have been around for a long time and you can more or less agree with most of those
things.

But what's important about this,

as it relates to Maggie is that you can't just want it more.

The growth mindset is not about wanting it more.

It's not about believing it so that it becomes a reality.

It's about believing it so that I put forth effort towards it.

And so this is the other piece of the growth mindset.

The growth mindset, the mechanism behind it

It is this idea that by putting forth effort each day, each day consistently, regardless
of the spot that I find myself in, I can make progress as long as I keep reflecting and

putting forth effort.

And that is the key to getting better at things.

And that's what Maggie's superpower is.

She's constantly reflecting and she's constantly putting forth more effort.

And we can all apply that and we'll talk about that in the practical application in the
next section.

But for right now, I want to look at how Maggie, like you said, Brian applies that with
her family.

Yeah.

And so let me frame that briefly more by saying what we see her is pursuing this goal,
right?

We see her putting, putting everything on the table in service of this goal.

And what that means in practice is that she cares more about the possibility of setting
herself up for success than she cares about the likelihood of suffering and loss and

discomfort right now.

Right?

Like she's, she's very much goal focused.

When we talk about our limit break framework, you should go watch our limit break
episodes.

the idea that she's dissatisfied with the current state of the world and she's got some
change in the world that she's trying to achieve and she's trying to bridge that gap with

effort, with persistence, with expertise, with growth.

She's not afraid.

She's not afraid of losing something.

She's not afraid of getting hit in the face.

She's not afraid of working really, really hard.

She's not really afraid to have to scrape together her pennies, right?

And so I think what we see the contrast there is in her relationship with her family,
which is portrayed as being much less successful.

you know, her mother, you know, who's, you know, cheating on welfare and her sister who's
cheating on welfare and Medicaid and her brother who's incarcerated, you know, they're

portrayed as being not very successful and being fairly selfish about it.

So bring us into our mountaintop.

What's a moment in this movie that sort of illustrates the difference in her mindset
compared with her family?

Yeah, so we have a couple different moments with her family, but let's start with the
moment where she decides she's finally got enough money and she's been having Maggie these

moments with her mentor, Frankie, who he's like, okay, are you saving money?

Like, are you making sure to be smart with your finances?

And he sees her checkbook and she is, and clearly she's not spending it on her current
accommodations or anything like that, because she doesn't care about that.

And then she's like,

She comes to tell Frankie, well, I bought a house and it's like a mile down the road from
where my mom currently lives.

And actually it's for my family.

And Frankie's like, okay.

He can see it.

He understands why this is a thing that she would do.

And then she asks Frankie to go with her to let her mom know that she bought her a house.

And obviously this is a thing that, you know, it's a moment with many famous athletes
like.

you know, buying my parents a car and a house or whatever, right?

You might do it if you're even if you're not a famous athlete, it's a way to give back to
somebody who gave to you.

But the problem is she does it.

And the first thing her mom does is criticize her.

Right.

Her sister comes in and she's like, there's not even a fridge.

And she's like, I already ordered it.

It'll be here soon.

And then her mom's like, well, I'm not going to be able to cheat on welfare.

Like, I'm not going to be able to continue to skate by barely alive anymore because you've
given me something of actual value.

Right.

Right.

they are in that moment, they are more worried about losing the minimal things that they
already have, which is basically government assistance, than they are excited about

gaining the potential for a more comfortable lifestyle to be able to, you know, kind of
step up and be more successful.

And so the classical descriptions of this,

are either the endowment effect where you assign more value to things that you have than
things you don't have or loss aversion is the flip side of it is like I am I'm afraid of

losing a thing that I've got and that causes me to, you know, not not feel pleasure in
anticipating something new or not being willing to take something on new.

And those are I think they're both kind of the absolute flip side of where Maggie is,
partly because she feels like she doesn't have anything that she values.

but also because she's willing to go through risk in order to get to a goal.

And what we see is the contrast with her family is they are completely unwilling to accept
any risk of losing their current minimal lifestyle, their current minimal income to

potentially get to something better, to be able to enjoy something better.

Yeah, I would even take it another level Brian.

She's willing to go through the pain and this is key to the growth mindset.

Maggie is willing to go through the pain that it's going to take to put forth that effort.

I mean, just go back in the movie a little bit before this section when Maggie is, she's
getting knocked down, she breaks her nose and she's asking Frankie like, no, just, just

fix my nose right now.

I just need 30 seconds.

Let me go back in there and I'm going to keep fighting.

I'm gonna put forth effort.

And that's Maggie's character, obviously, that she's willing to take these risks, but
she's willing to go through the pain right there of having her nose fixed on the spot and

continue to fight.

And it's the same thing she does with her family, right?

She goes in, she offers them this gift, and what does she get?

They punch from the nose.

But she's willing to continue to go through that because she has high integrity, because
she's being mentored by Frankie who has high integrity.

And they believe that there's a right way to do things, a consistent way of doing things
that will result in better things for the world, even when you get punched in the face for

doing it that way.

Right.

And she's, she's willing to keep trying, right?

She's willing to keep going back even when it fails, even when she tries something for her
family and they, you know, they kind of barf on it.

She went every time she gets knocked down on the ring, she comes back to the corner and
her question to Frankie is always not like, why didn't you tell me, or this isn't going to

work or, my God, we're going to fail.

It's always like, what am I doing wrong?

What can I do better?

How do I, you know, how do I solve this problem?

She's always about going on attacking the problem.

so as well.

she is Brian and in a way, you know, she does that at the end as well.

You could argue at the end she's giving up on her family when they come in and they try to
get her to sign off on the papers with a lawyer to sign all of her money as she's going to

die over to them.

But I think actually what's happening there is integrity, it's consistency of her
character because she's loving her family and she has a realization that

It's not out of spite and hatred for her family.

It's out of love for her family that she's doing this because she realizes that giving
them money is going to just worsen the problem.

That cannot be the solution for people in that current situation.

It's at least recognition that it wouldn't be helpful, it wouldn't be skillful to just
enable them further.

And yeah, so obviously can't ignore the elephant in the room here.

The movie doesn't end well for Maggie.

Maggie, on one level, achieves many of her goals.

She gets to the championship fight.

She's a very successful fighter.

She develops expertise.

She's able to experience the joy that she imagined in her life.

She's able to develop the relationship with Frankie that she never had with her natural
family.

But then she ends up paralyzed and wanting to, you and wanting to die in, you know, on a
ventilator in a hospital.

so this isn't a movie about inevitable success.

This isn't a superhero movie where the good guys always win and walk away at the end.

Right.

This is, this is a movie about that tension and conflict and risk that is inevitable in
trying to achieve something extraordinary and what sort of the human experience is of it.

so.

That's kind of what I want to focus on here.

We'll talk about this more from Frankie's viewpoint in our next episode.

But the takeaway here from, I don't think you can come away from this movie watching
Maggie's experience and saying, well, she shouldn't have tried.

She should have stayed a waitress, right?

Like nobody would watch this movie and be like, well, she should have just been satisfied
to be a waitress because that would have been better.

It wouldn't have been.

She had the experiences she wanted to have.

She pursued the things that she wanted to have despite the risks.

And part of the wonderful things about this world are the things that are created by
people that are willing to go out on a limb for them.

But that doesn't mean the risks are not there.

That doesn't mean that the good guys always get to go live in the mansion and retire at
the end.

Right?

What we see in this movie also is that there are real downsides and real potential for
failure.

that's facing, that is part of the commitment, is part of the persistence, is part of the
integrity.

It is.

And I think this is a good spot to take this and make it even a little bit more practical.

Hopefully, you know, talking about Maggie Fitzgerald and her journey, her developing or
having this mindset of putting forth effort has been helpful to think about in our own

lives because I know I can always improve on that.

And trying to take this into a practical application, it, to me, it's really personal.

because it has to start there.

We can't start with a business application of the growth mindset.

This has to be something that you do individually to develop this mindset.

You you want to view the world through the lens of I can get more skillful, I can get
better.

And the method that I'm going to do it is by putting forth effort.

It's not going to be by being smarter.

It's not going to be by being better at a certain skill or something like that.

It's only going to be by putting forth effort.

That's it.

And so for me,

You know, my story and my mission and commitment in my life goes back to what would have
been 2018 when I had my moment.

if you want to go back, there's a Iron Man episode back in the YouTube so that you can go
look at where we talked about this a little bit more deeply.

But for me, there was a moment after my sister died where I realized.

I have to do something different and that coincided with this very short term moment with
one of my father's greatest mentors, Steve King, being here for this very short moment and

having this superpower of calmness, having this, this ability to come into a room and have
compassion on people, being able to inspire people even in difficult situations.

Basically the way I describe it is when he walks into the room,

You know, people know he's there.

There is a warmth or a glow, a light that comes off of him basically.

And you can't help but be changed by it.

And that realization for me at that moment, when I was I would describe myself much like
Maggie described herself at the beginning of the movie, like I was nothing at that point.

I was a piece of crap.

I was not helping the world.

I was not helping other people.

But I had this realization, if I can do one thing, this is it.

I need to become like this guy.

I have to become like Steve King.

And so what did I have to do?

Well, it was a long journey and it still is a long journey.

But I just remember in that moment having to put one step in front of the other each day.

I'm going to have to change my ways.

I'm to have to start working out every day.

I'm going to have to journal every day.

I'm going to have to get up much earlier, sit in silence, pray, do the things I have to do
in order to get myself right.

And it's only that effort.

It's getting out there and serving people.

I'm going to have to serve the least of these in society.

These are the things that it requires to become a person of character, a person who really
can make an impact in the world.

And Maggie's story is a little bit different than that, but not really because isn't the
framing the same?

Isn't the boxing match that Maggie finds herself in, isn't that our lives, right?

Our lives might last a lot more rounds than a single boxing match.

or our rounds might be a little bit longer.

But that's really what it's all about.

It's about when you get knocked down, standing back up.

That's the advantage.

Resilience is the thing that human beings are great at.

Yes.

And this, this goes back to the commitment of superpower, right?

Like is that that's, it is, it is necessary, maybe not sufficient, but it is necessary to
achieve the goals that you have for yourself.

And the experience of, you know, being deeper into your career is that those, those
trade-offs, those challenges never go away, right?

If you have a little bit of success and that just feels like more risk, like, I could lose
this.

Like I could lose the success that I've got.

could lose the position that I've got.

You know, if I quit and go back to school, then that's giving up all the certainty that
I've got with my current career to potentially have another thing that I want.

Right.

You, have, you're always having to evaluate that.

You're always having to decide and kind of keep your eyes to the future.

But the risk aversion, the loss aversion doesn't help you achieve a goal.

It just helps you have your eyes open to the risks.

Right.

And so I think what, you know, this movie shows us that tension over and over again of
characters that are.

both have high aspirations and are very aware of what it feels like to fail.

and that's a, that's a real experience as a learner, as a, person with aspirations, which
is what I think really this episode talking about Maggie's viewpoint, wanting to be the

hero, wanting to be the superstar, wanting to be the champion.

And I think what we'll do in the next episode is talk about what does that look like as a
leader?

What does it look like if you are the mentor, if you're Frankie, if you are trying to
coach somebody to doing something that is both extraordinary and risky.

What's the emotional weight of that?

What about the other side of it, though?

Because this is Wander Tour and we do have this beautiful dichotomy in this movie because
there's a story here that's told through just a couple different scenes and it's the story

of Dagger.

Right.

It's the story of this fighter who has his own mental challenges and, you know, he just he
has this dream and this mission of becoming a title fighter.

but he can't even stand in the ring, his mindset isn't there.

And by the end of the movie, he just makes a little bit of progress, a little bit of
progress, a little bit of progress.

He punches the bag at the end, right?

He puts one good punch in, he stands in the ring, even though he gets beat up.

But what's important is that, you know, for Morgan Freeman's character, Scraps, Dagger
comes back, the silver lining at the end of this movie isn't Maggie gets better from her

traumatic injury.

Right.

that Clint Eastwood finally solves his trauma.

It's not.

The only silver lining on this movie is at the end, Scraps and Dagger, and they get back
up and they do it again.

They're still trying.

Yeah.

And they, they watched Maggie and Frankie go through this whole sequence and they're
still, they're still trying.

They're trying, trying to help each other out.

That's awesome.

I love it.

that Dagger's developing.

And so while it might be too easy to say, we all should be more like Maggie.

It's like, yes, Maggie is special.

What makes her special, like you said, is her commitment and her growth mindset.

And everybody can do that.

Dagger can do that.

And Brian, you can do that.

And I can do that.

Love it.

I think that's it right there.

All right, well, this was fun.

Such an amazing movie.

I'm really looking forward to discussing it from Frankie's viewpoint in our second
episode.

So that's coming up next.

We really hope you join us for that.

In the meantime, just remember, as always, character is destiny.