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Welcome to Lead Wisely by Wondertour.

We're back in our Trust the Process series with episode 126.

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

This is an absolutely fantastic movie.

It's not as much of a happy ending or a heroic tale as we often do here on Wondertour, but
for us, this is a perfect opportunity to just embrace the conflict that life holds, the

conflict of leadership.

The fact that decisions aren't always going to be straightforward and easy and there's not
a leadership manual that we can write or we can find that's just going to have solutions

for us.

So in this episode, we're going to talk about Frankie.

We're going to talk about this conflicted Clint Eastwood character who has his own past
and is bringing that past into the mentoring of his fighters.

And in the end, there's no clear resolution to this story.

So Brian, I want to start out with a question for you.

because Clint Eastwood has this character of risk aversion, right?

That's what he's all about.

He has this moment with scraps, Morgan Freeman's character where he loses his eye in a
fight and he feels responsibility for it as the mentor and the manager.

And so he becomes extremely risk averse.

So Brian, let's try to make this applicable.

How do you protect yourself and the ones that you're leading from risk?

No, this is a great question, but also kind of a dummy question, right?

Because you can't, The thing that we see in this movie, the thing that we feel intuitively
and don't want to accept is that there is no such thing as always protect yourself.

Like that's Frankie's mantra that he's always, you know, harping on with Maggie as he's
training her.

And he's not wrong.

Right?

Like he's, he's not wrong.

Like if you're going to go into a boxing ring, you should probably keep your, hands up.

You should probably not turn your back.

You should probably, you know, prioritize waiting for the right opportunity rather than
going in swinging violently.

Like he's not wrong, but it's impossible to always protect yourself and strive for
something great at the same time.

Right?

Like we talked about in the last episode, if your mindset is loss aversion or risk
aversion, like I don't want to let anything bad happen to me.

You will never expose yourself to an opportunity.

If your mindset is like, don't ever want to get punched, then you'll never take a swing.

Right.

And so really what we're seeing in this movie, what's what this thing, this movie is so
good at and the Clint Eastwood character is so good at is just showing us the emotional

weight of leadership.

You cannot possibly embrace another person's growth and embrace another person's goals.

spend years with them persevering through struggles, right?

know, sharing successes, sharing failures, coaching them through, you know, things that
they need to learn.

You can't possibly do that and not expose yourself to risk and not expose yourself to the
fact that you can get hurt.

They can get hurt.

You can both fail.

One or both of you could be wrong.

And the framing of this is great because Frankie comes into this story.

already knowing that he comes into this story.

Like you said, he's got 25 years ago, 30 years ago, he had this experience with, with his
best friend who lost an eye in a fight where he was the cut man, where he wanted to be

able to, you know, get him out of the fight, but couldn't.

He's got this experience where he's got this unexplained failed relationship with his
family, where he never, you know, he keeps sending letters to his daughter.

She keeps sending them back and he never resolves that.

Like he knows the potential of failure.

He knows the potential of never achieving your goals.

so he's trying to be very close.

He's trying to be very protective of himself.

He's trying to be very productive of, you know, his first real conversation with Maggie is
like, you're too old and this isn't going to work.

And I hate to be the one to tell you, but you're never going to be successful as you
shouldn't try.

Like, you know, he's just like right up front, trying to protect her from the potential
for disappointment.

Like you're just, what are you going to go fight some 21 year olds?

This isn't a good idea.

Right.

He's got this armor on, he's got this shell of like, always protect yourself.

But he's vulnerable to the appeal because he does believe in greatness.

He does believe in success.

He does really want to coach a championship fighter.

He does really want to have a close relationship with somebody that he mentors.

Like he actually does want those things and he believes in people despite his fears.

Right?

So he opens himself up to risk in this movie.

He opens himself up to, you know, emotional vulnerability again, and opens his protege up
to physical risk, which is boxing is the great metaphor for that.

Like you are literally getting punched over and over again.

Right.

And what this movie, you know, does it do is tell us that it's all going to work out.

This movie is like, yeah, that's, that's a real thing and it could go very, very badly and
it will fall on you.

If you're the leader.

If you're the mentor, if you are the person that's saying this is what you need to do and
this is how it's going to work and this is your potential, it's going to fall on you.

Even if it wasn't necessarily your idea, even if it wasn't necessarily your fault, you're
going to feel that weight.

And that's the thing that I think is so powerful about this movie is just sort of showing
that tension between aspirations and the emotional risks of failure.

Yeah.

And to your point, you have to take risks to build relationships.

Like that is what creates these strong ties in relationships.

It's not always keeping somebody at an arm's length.

It's not always telling somebody what they want to hear.

What builds these deep relationships is the arguments, right?

It's the productive arguments.

It's the challenging somebody to tell them you're not doing good enough and you're not
going to be able to be successful with the way that you're currently operating.

Like that's the type of deep relationships that humans crave.

The problem is in order to get there, you have to be willing to take risks.

You can't just keep somebody at a I'm going to send you letters length, right?

Like he has with his daughter where he's just sending these letters that are getting
returned to sender as we see at the end.

Is that really what it's about?

Is that really how we're going to conduct ourselves in life, how we're going to build
relationships?

We have to be willing to go out there and take a certain level of risk.

And that's what's venerable about.

what he learns and does in this movie.

And that's really, you know, as all great mentor mentee relationships, you know, the
mentor ends up learning more than the mentee probably, but that's what he learns really

from Maggie, right?

Is this that it's okay to take risks in the end, outcomes are going to fall on a
distribution.

It's not easy to decide how things end up.

It's not.

Nobody can be deterministic about this.

The only way to be deterministic about risk tolerance is to have no tolerance for risk at
all.

And if you do that, then let's get a little bit mechanistic about it for a second here,
Brian, right?

Just think of a normal distribution.

I know not all events fall on normal distributions, but if you just think of a bell curve
in your head, right?

The goal of risk aversion is to push everything towards the center of that curve, right?

We wanna make that curve so skinny that all the results that happen happen like right
there.

right in there near the median.

The illusion of control.

Yeah, it's the illusion of control.

Exactly.

But what does that do?

It consolidates all outcomes on marginal benefits.

It consolidates all outcomes on getting the benefit of stability, but there's no upside
anymore.

Sure, you squeeze out a lot of the downside, but you also squeeze out a lot of the upside.

And the upside is what makes transformative changes in the world.

The upside is what gives, you know, joy to people is swinging for upside is what gives
people hope and dreams.

And the upside is

Like that's what Maggie teaches Frankie.

She's like, no, we have to swing for the far end of the curve sometimes.

Like let me go in for the title fight.

We don't know what's going to happen if I do, but we have to take that chance.

All right, well, I'll tell you what.

Let's talk about that moment and what that implies for both of them on the other side of
the intro.

Hi, I'm Brian Nutwell.

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

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, all
one word.

So we have this relationship where the more time they spend together, as naturally
happens, right?

The more struggles they overcome together, the more they get to understand each other.

know, Frankie and Maggie established this real bond.

They established this real rapport where even when she's sort of ignoring what he tells
her to do, still, you know, he understands it's because they're aligned on the higher

level goals.

And even when he's telling her she's an idiot,

being very gruff with her, she understands that it's because they're aligned on higher
level goals and he's trying to push her in the right direction.

There's a really deep layer of trust that builds up here.

And we see that both between Scraps and Frankie from their long history, and we see that
develop between Frankie and Maggie in this movie is that this sort of shared worldview and

shared experiences puts them in a position where they can do extraordinary things
together, where they can really provide a lot.

comfort to each other.

Yeah.

So let's talk a little bit about some practical examples of like, what's this is like when
you are attached to a goal, when you have commitment to a goal, when you are attached to

your team, when you really.

Sincerely want to succeed.

Like this is not an unusual situation.

Even people that are grinding away every day in a job that they don't necessarily a
hundred percent believe in a little bit frustrated with their situation, a little bit

frustrated with their, their life choices.

my experience is that many of them still have within them this seed of like, I really want
to do something great.

If I just had the chance, I could do something great.

Right?

I'll have an example in my, former corporate life, I had the opportunity to run a,
innovation project, kind of a sidebar where we brought people in from across the

organization and had them come up with ideas for business improvements.

And then we're mentoring them through this kind of eight week.

sprint on the side of their regular jobs, hour or two a week, like come up with a way to
do something, a new product for the company or a new improvement that we could make

through a design thinking process, thinking about the customer value, thinking about the
business value, trying to get to the point where we can sort of shortcut a presentation to

the leaders about these things that we could do.

And it was, some of the ideas were silly and most of the ideas were quite good, you know,
technically feasible or not or whatever.

But the thing that I was amazed about, about this eight week process that people were
doing voluntarily in a framework that we, you know, kind of adapted from different pieces

in a slightly different way than we'd ever done inside the organization.

The amount of emotional weight that showed up in those meetings.

we had teams of people from different groups that had never worked with each other before
that spent like 20 hours together over the space of six weeks became incredibly close

friends.

We had tears, had rage, we had incandescent upset people in the middle of the meeting
room.

Like all of that energy, all of that emotion, all of that commitment was there already.

And they were just, it was just like puncturing a balloon and it comes out and like, you
know, you put some people together that have similar goals, but not quite the same goals.

And they become incredibly frustrated because they're so excited to have the chance to
show themselves.

So excited to have the chance for their idea to get out there in the world.

it was really informative for me, literally.

Like we have people crying in meeting rooms, talking about trying to get this, you know,
this widget, this piece of software, this piece of hardware to onto a car.

was a really interesting experience and kind of fabulous to see the, the passion and the
creativity that was sort of there under the surface of people that were shown up to work

every day and doing a really great job, but not kind of getting to that level of
engagement with their day to day.

with their, 40 hours a week that they were committed to.

and so I think that, you know, this movie shows us, know, Frankie and Maggie starting
from, not zero, at least from a fairly not having a lot to hold onto.

And that's part of what allows them to take these risks.

But that's not that unusual people have these aspirations.

have these incredible drives.

They have this incredible frustration with the state of events very frequently that's in
there.

And it's totally possible to tap into that.

And there's potential joy, there's potential excitement, there's potential like, I came up
with this amazing thing, but there's also potential real pain.

There's potential real frustration.

There's potential real guilt as a leader.

If you've tapped into that and then you can't land the deal, you can't successfully get
that project approved.

You can't successfully let that person thrive in the way that they're picturing.

You almost feel like it's on you, even though you like put all this energy into standing
up the opportunity and putting them in a position to succeed.

If they don't all succeed, you feel like it's your fault.

Yeah, there's that spirit that you're talking about that's inside of everyone that we want
to dream, we want to believe that we can do bigger things.

We want to challenge the existing status quo.

And it's different in each person.

But you're right there.

If it's allowed to foster, basically, there is that spirit inside of each person to create
something.

I think would be like the simplest way to describe it.

And you're trying to unlock it as a leader.

You're trying to help other people.

to be able to create.

And it is a little bit like what Frankie's dealing with here.

He can see when he meets Maggie that she's got this great fire in her.

Like, you know, what better definition of a spirit in somebody that is, you know, allowing
them to do something than it's very fiery.

And that is what we see with Maggie, but he's he is worried about being able to control
it.

And he almost at first believes that there's some responsibility that he has to actually
control that fire when in reality.

Brian, is that something that you should be concerned with as a leader?

It is, it goes back to the conversation about risk aversion is that you, want to look for
that, right?

You know, when you're,

going to put your energy into mentoring somebody when you're trying to build a team to
accomplish something in the world, whether it's your goal or theirs that you're trying to

accomplish.

Like, you know, that fire is an amazing asset.

You're looking for people that are going to persist.

You're looking for people that have the superpower of commitment.

Absolutely.

You know, you're looking to align them and you're looking to build their skills.

But there's, but there's that risk, right?

You know, if you have that much commitment to something that could fail because all
things, all initiatives can fail and you have that much commitment and you could fail.

you have the potential for frustration, have the potential for pain, you have the
potential for suffering, you have the potential for real guilt and grief.

And this movie, again, as Hollywood does, makes it a really exaggerated version, not an
end of the world Thanos is gonna kill half of all sentient beings, bad thing, but this

person that Frankie loves gets permanently injured, like becomes, she's on a ventilator,
paralyzed in a hospital.

no longer able to aspire to her goals.

that's a, still a pretty big glossy Hollywood version of risk, but it's a real risk,
right?

You know, that you can not only fail, but fail spectacularly in a way that you can't get
up from.

And that happens in life.

And as a leader, you, you will often be faced with that.

Like the things that people that you mentor people that are on your team may not succeed.

And it will feel like your fault, even if they were committed and would have done it,
would have tried it anyway.

So I think that's one of the things that's really powerful about this movie is just sort
of illustrating that risk is there.

You will inevitably become attached if you truly share goals, if you truly share effort
and time together with people, you will inevitably become attached to their success and

you will inevitably experience pain and suffering when things don't go the way you expect.

And like we talked about in the first episode, I don't think you could watch this movie
and go, well, Maggie should have stayed a waitress, right?

And she shouldn't have tried.

I don't think you could watch this movie and say, well, Frankie should have just told her
to, you like, you can keep punching that bag, but I'm not training you.

There's no way you should ever get in a ring.

You're too old.

I don't think that's the lesson that most of us take away from watching these kinds of
stories.

You you said there's a lot of possible outcomes from being in a boxing ring.

And most of them are you've retired and you weren't the champion and you may have suffered
some physical ailments.

Right?

That doesn't necessarily mean that nobody should strive to achieve their goals.

That doesn't necessarily mean that nobody should strive to achieve their goals.

It doesn't mean that you shouldn't try.

It doesn't mean that you shouldn't be willing to train somebody to do something risky.

Yeah.

I mean, there's a million different anecdotes of wisdom about this, right?

It's better to have tried and failed than not to have tried at all.

It's better to have loved and have lost than never to have loved at all.

And we're seeing both of those things kind of pulled through together right here.

And so let's go up to our mountain top and see what we can see here, Brian.

Let's talk about the moment where we see Frankie kind of have this transition from being
super protective

very risk averse with Maggie to allowing a little bit more risk and through that, kind of
what changes that makes in their relationship and in the world at large.

I think the...

The moment in this movie is where after kind of working her way up through the ranks and
kind of doing as he did with his previous fighter, he keeps telling her, you're not quite

ready for a fight.

You you only get one really good shot at this, which is his rationale for like, you might
get hurt and you might fail and you might not be able to come back and succeed.

So I want to, I want to delay the potential failure as long as possible.

He finally gives in, right?

he sees her persist through other fights and finally he gives in.

He's like, all right, I scheduled a fight for you with this British champion.

We're going to fly over to England.

You're going to.

going to get a shot to defeat a very highly ranked fighter.

And right before they go out, you know, walk out to the ring, he gives her this, you know,
elaborate, fairly garish green coat that's got some Gaelic inscription on the back of it.

But he won't tell her what the Gaelic means.

And so it's kind of a fun moment because we finally learn at the end of the movie,
translation of this translation of the Gaelic Mocushla.

is something like the pulse of my heart.

It's love, it's family, it's, you know, I'm bought in, we're one.

Like it's a very loving, attached thing.

And so he's completely bought into Maggie's success.

He's completely bought into, he and Maggie are perfectly aligned on the goals and he has
accepted the risk that she could get hurt.

He's accepted the fact that she wants to take.

the big swing and take the big risk and potentially be really successful and potentially
get hurt.

Right.

And that's a shift for him where he's been telling her all along, always protect yourself
where he's been sort of guarding himself all along.

He's been gradually opening up.

And this is the point at which he is completely bought into the level of commitment that
she has of trying to achieve the goal over the risk of getting.

Yeah, I love the putting on of the green jacket, right?

Because it's the first time that we really kind of see her more as a professional boxer
versus as an amateur too, as the audience.

And this movie does such a good job with this kind of chiaroscuro style of like light
shining into the darkness, Very common way to do things in movies coming back from the

Renaissance.

I'm sure there's a lot more art stuff that people could tell me about that I don't know
about, but.

It reminds me a lot of Cherus Kuro styling.

And so I'm sure it's inspired by it where you have this like darkness with light shining
in and it's the focal point of the light that's meaningful.

And you get this so many different times with Mokushla, with Maggie, this light breaking
through the darkness, but the darkness still being there.

And to me that is the conflict that we see.

in Frankie, the darkness is never really gone, but there's a light that shines through it.

And when you focus on the light, there's something worth living for.

And when you focus on the light, there's something worth living for.

There's something worth continuing to take risks for.

So there is a question that it brings to mind to me because we're not here to analyze the
life of Maggie in this movie, right?

We're here to talk about the conflict of leadership.

But I think these are the questions that you have to ask yourself.

This is the philosophy that we have to develop ourselves.

Maggie has what 33, 34 years of life and most of it she would call was nothing.

But then she has a year or more at the end there.

where she does something that she's really passionate about, where that light shines
really brightly.

So I think we all have to ask ourselves this question.

Would it be worth it to take the risk if you had just one year, just one year to do
something meaningful, where you were able to feel fulfilled, where you were able to shine

that light out into the world, that unique light that you have?

And would it be enough if it was just one month?

that you could do that and that would be it or would it you can keep going down right is
one day would it be worth trading it for one day to have that versus not to have it for

the rest of your life.

Yeah, it's an impossible question, but the potential for that day, the potential for that
month, the potential for that year, for that glorious future success is, if it's still out

there in front of you, I think this movie is hopeful about trying for it.

We see Frankie coming in as he knows very well the risks.

He's very apprehensive because of the risks, despite his expertise.

because of his expertise, like he knows, right?

that people in a boxing ring could get hurt.

He knows that he could set somebody up for failure, right?

And he, so he's naturally very cautious about it, but it's entirely his idea, right?

He's not like going and plucking Maggie off the street and trying to convince her that she
can be successful and trying to convince her that she should go risk herself in the ring.

She kind of really wants to do that already.

He has to decide whether he's going to take on the emotional burden of training her and
being involved in that risk, being exposing himself to

the potential for the emotional pain, right?

He has to decide that, but it's not his commitment.

It's her commitment that moves this thing forward.

And so I think we, you have to respect people's willingness to take on risks in their own
lives.

and you can choose to help them if you feel like you're the right person to help them.

You can choose to be on their team or have you have them on your team,

Yeah, and to in that situation, right, to know that what our job is, is to have high
integrity.

It's to have high character and embody that for other people so that that person that you
are leading, that you're mentoring, that they too might see that and might strive towards

that.

Because really, like you said, if Maggie has this fire inside of her, that person that
you're leading,

has this fire inside them that you're a little bit worried about because you're like that
fire could kind of burn out of control.

Mm-hmm.

The question is not, if that fire should be stoked or not to me, it's am I the right
person to be stoking that fire?

And then if I am going to be, am I doing it responsibly?

Am I doing it in a way where the my actions that I'm taking, the questions I'm asking, the
stories I'm telling to this person, the time I'm spending with them is modeling, what I

understand to be the best possible way to live.

That way, regardless of how that fire ends up burning, I did my job.

I completed my task.

Yeah, and you have to match that level of commitment, right?

That's the challenge, right?

We see that early in the movie where he tries to pawn her off on another manager for her
first real fight.

It's like, okay, well I drained you, but now you can go up to the other.

Like, that's not the point at which she needs less help from him when she has her first
real test.

That's not the point at which you should just like pass her off to somebody that's
disinterested.

That fight doesn't go well.

Like she's getting beat up because she doesn't have.

somebody in her corner who's committed and he's, he's unhappy about it.

Like everybody's unhappy at that point, right?

If you're going to take that challenge on, you have to match the level of commitment.

And that's, that's, that's the tension that we see throughout this movie.

That's the thing to be aware of as the leader is that matching the commitment is that
getting involved in these extraordinary goals is inevitably exposing yourself to risk.

There's no always protect yourself and strive for something great.

Exactly.

There's going to be risk.

And because there's going to be risk, it's critical that we're committed and it's critical
that we're committed to developing magnanimous character as we say here on WonderTour

right?

Just continuing to get better for the good of others and to do things that benefit other
people, not just the benefit ourselves.

And in doing so,

you're going to end up in the situations like Frankie's in where there's conflict.

There's just, there's going to be situations where it feels like you end up in, you know,
everything falls apart in a relationship, mentally, physically, whatever it is.

There absolutely are those situations for any number of reasons that it could happen, but
just to continue to put one foot in front of the other, to continue to, like you said,

Brian, focus on

the mission and focus on the good of others, that's the best you can do in that situation.

I think part of the problem that Frankie has is he has too high of expectations for
himself for some reason.

He does, but also just his experience.

He's aware of the challenges.

But yeah, this is not a superhero movie.

There's no space wizards, there's no explosions, there's no Wonder Woman, Daughter of Zeus
character here, right?

These are all just people that are fallible, suffering, marginally competent people.

we see all the Wonder Tour lessons, right?

We see the limit break arc of...

of having the aspirational goal and coaching people to achieve their goals, not your
goals.

We see the Dr.

Strange lesson of it's not about you.

Giving of yourself as a leader is not about whether you succeed or fail.

It's about helping them achieve their goals.

And we see all of those lessons in a very different lens in this movie.

But I'm super glad we picked this one.

This was a lot of fun.

Yeah, I love the conflict.

It definitely gives me a to think about, Brian.

All right.

I think that's it for today.

Thank you so much, everyone, for joining us.

Next time we are going to switch gears, we will have some space wizards, or at least some
space mercenaries.

We're going to pick a couple episodes out of the Disney plus Mandalorian Star Wars TV
series to explore, trust the process and training in the context of this is the way.

This is the way.

There we go.

we'll work on our voices for that one.

In the meantime, hope you have a great week.

Hope you join us next time.

Just remember, as always, character is destiny.