From a donkey that refused to stay buried to a Ford ad that would need trigger warnings in 2026, Steve and David explore John C. Maxwell’s How to Get a Return on Failure and why your worst week in business might be your most valuable investment yet.
John C. Maxwell’s How to Get a Return on Failure lands on the TAM desk, and Steve and David put it through their own filter: the folksy bits, the genuinely useful bits, and the bits where a neuroanatomist and a business coach turn out to be saying the exact same thing.
David reflects on the day he realised he would not finish his PhD, and why that 2-out-of-10 moment turned out to be one of the most important recalibrations of his working life.
A Meta phishing scam that apparently does not breach community standards has both hosts reaching for their Lord of the Flies analogies.
And a 1977 Ford Granada ad raises a question that cuts deeper than any car commercial should: have we traded a learner mindset for a judger mindset, and what have we lost in the process?
Get ready to take notes.
Talking About Marketing podcast episode notes with timecodes
02:00 Person This segment focusses on you, the person, because we believe business is personal.
When Shame Gets Off the Table
In the Person segment, Steve and David dig into Maxwell’s central argument: that failure is an investment, and like any investment, you can get a return on it if you handle it properly. The catch is that shame gets in the way before you even have a chance to analyse what happened.
David’s reflection on his abandoned PhD is the anchor here. At the time, it felt like a solid 2 out of 10. In retrospect, it was the moment that freed up everything that came next. Maxwell’s book, How To Get A Return On Failure, puts language around that kind of reframe, and David gives it real weight by grounding it in lived experience rather than theory.
The dinner table story lands particularly well: a father who asked his children every night what they had failed at that day, and celebrated every answer. The only exception? When the failure had a moral or ethical dimension and the child had not yet recognised it as such. For every other kind of stumble, the response was curiosity, not correction. As Steve notes, that is the fastest way to raise someone who does not spend their school years too embarrassed to put their hand up.
15:15 Principles This segment focusses principles you can apply in your business today.
Six Steps, Zero Excuses
The Principles segment takes Maxwell’s framework and applies it directly to the business context. Steve walks David through six steps drawn from a video Maxwell produced alongside the book, and two of them dominate the conversation.
The first is the distinction between a good miss and a bad miss. A good miss is one you learn from and adjust. A bad miss is one you excuse. Maxwell’s line here stops both hosts in their tracks: a really good excuse is a really bad excuse, because it is convincing enough that everyone believes it, including you, and so you stop adjusting and start collecting excuses instead.
The second is the idea of keeping failure and success together rather than fixating on either one. Maxwell uses a slightly laboured physical exercise to make the point, which David declines to take seriously, but the underlying principle holds: success without failure creates pride, and failure without success destroys resilience. Keep them together and you stay balanced. Separate them and you lose the lesson from both.
David draws a line to Stoicism, and Steve connects the whole conversation to Jill Bolte Taylor’s Whole Brain Living from the previous episode. The message is consistent across a neuroanatomist and a folksy American business coach: breathe, reflect, then ask what resources you have and what you do next.
28:30 Problems This segment answers questions we've received from clients or listeners.
Meta’s Community Standards Are a Riddle
The Problems segment is fuelled by genuine frustration. Steve received a message flagging a copyright claim against his content, reported it as a likely phishing scam, and was told by Meta that it did not breach community standards.
What Perplexity confirmed is that these scams are sophisticated: the emails genuinely come from Meta’s servers, triggered by legitimate business manager accounts with deceptively official-sounding names. The notifications are real. The requesters are not. And Meta’s automated systems cannot, or will not, distinguish between them.
David’s verdict is delivered without hesitation: hiring humans and treating them with respect would solve the problem, and that is precisely why it has not been solved. The practical takeaway is simple and worth repeating: trust nothing in your inbox or your social accounts that asks you to take urgent action. Bounce it off someone you trust before you click anything.
32:00 Perspicacity This segment is designed to sharpen our thinking by reflecting on a case study from the past.
The Ad That Would Need a Trigger Warning
In Perspicacity, Steve plays a 1977 Ford Granada television advertisement in which a man at a drive-in keeps getting into the wrong car and being ejected with escalating indignation. The ad’s point is that the Granada looks so good it could be mistaken for a Cadillac or a Mercedes. The humour relies entirely on forgivable social awkwardness.
David’s assessment is that if you ran this ad today, it would need trigger warnings. Not because the scenario has changed, but because our response to social awkwardness has. In 1977, you got back in the right car and life moved on. In 2026, the person next to you has their phone out and the footage is online before you reach the exit.
What follows is the sharpest exchange of the episode. David argues that we have collectively shifted from a learner mindset to a judger mindset, and that the speed at which we now consume everything is the reason: judging is fast, learning takes time. Steve connects this directly back to Maxwell, noting that a learner mindset is the exact disposition the book is trying to build in business owners. The ad, accidentally, becomes a test case for whether we still have the patience to ask what actually happened before we decide who is to blame.
Transcript This transcript was generated using Descript.
A Machine-Generated Transcript – Beware Errors
TAMP S08E07
Caitlin Davis: [00:00:00] Thinking about Marketing is a podcast for business owners and leaders, produced by Steve Davis and David Oldney of Talked About Marketing. More than 8,000 conversations have taught them something. You can’t read the label from inside the bottle. Everyone needs external perspective. Through their four Ps, person, principles, problems, and perspicacity, yes, you heard that correctly, they explore marketing with curiosity, generosity, and the occasional gentle eye roll.
They hope this becomes a trusted companion on your journey in business[00:01:00]
Steve Davis: David?
David Olney: Yes, Steve.
Steve Davis: Have you ever right royally stuffed something up?
David Olney: Oh, I have indeed.
Steve Davis: Out of 10, how joyful was that experience?
David Olney: Hmm, the day I realized I was not gonna finish my PhD, I think was a probably … Actually, out of 10, are we going with a high number being really bad or a low number being really bad?
Steve Davis: High ba- high number being really happy.
David Olney: High number being really happy. Okay, so low number being really bad. In that case, I’m going with realizing I’m not gonna finish my PhD, I don’t want to finish my PhD, but I have no idea what I’m doing next, was a solid 2 out of 10 day.
Steve Davis: And we’ll explain why there might even be a different way of doing that maths as this episode unfolds.
Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps. Number [00:02:00] one, person. These are insights for the whole person, not just the business operator. Oscar Wilde put it this way, “The aim of life is self-development, to realize one’s nature perfectly. That’s what each of us is here for.”
Steve Davis: In the person segment, we’re focusing our conversation today, both for this and the next segment, principles, on the book How to Get a Return on Failure, and it’s by John C.
Maxwell. It’s a book that you kicked into my world, David Olney. Why did you do that?
David Olney: Because I really liked the name, and even though John C. Maxwell is a very folksy American-style author and speaker, I’ve learnt so much in life out of failing. I like the fact that someone so mainstream had written a book on how failure can be massively beneficial.
Steve Davis: I’m glad you picked up the [00:03:00] folksy bit, because I think I’ve got a great antipathy towards this homespun round the fire, I’m really good, but I’m not gonna say I’m really good- Yeah …ness that many of these American writers have.
David Olney: It’s that wonderful, you know, thing from your writing for LinkedIn about humble bragging, that folksiness.
I’m very glad in my American job that I don’t have to deal with folksiness with my colleagues or with our attorney clients.
Steve Davis: With some of these books, and if, if you listen to this podcast, you’ll know, you’ll hear the books where I alert you to this. I’ve a very low threshold for it. Again, I think overall, on balance, it’s worth pushing through for.
Probably 20, 25% of the book just made me wanna squirm and turn it off, but I promised I’d go the distance. What’s he on about? So in essence, one of the things he talks about is when stuff happens, you shake off the dirt, and you [00:04:00] step up. This is a repeated image that’s used in the book. When you have setbacks, um, treat them as stepping stones, and in fact, he’s got a great little snippet here from his website that I think we might listen to to set this up before we go further into the content.
So this is from, uh, How to Get a Return on Failure. Here’s John C. Maxwell.
John C Maxwell: I’m gonna read to you what I wrote in the book. It’s a, it’s a funny story. Um, it, it’s about a donkey who, who fell in a well. Well, here’s the story, okay? He fell in the well. Um, let’s go. One day, a farmer’s donkey fell down into a well, and the animal cried hideously for hours as the farmer tried to figure out what to do.
Finally, he decided the animal was old, and the well needed to be covered up anyway. It just wasn’t worth it to retrieve the donkey, so he invited all of his neighbors to come over and help him. They all grabbed a [00:05:00] shovel and began to shovel dirt into the well, and at first, the donkey realized what was happening, and he cried horribly.
Then to everyone’s amazement, the donkey quieted down. A few shovel loads later, the farmer finally looked down the well, and he was astonished at what he saw. With each shovel of dirt that hit the donkey’s back, he did something that was amazing. He would shake off the dirt and take a step up, and as the farmer’s neighbors continued to shovel dirt on top of the animal, he would shake it off and take a step up, and pretty soon, everyone was amazed as the donkey stepped over the edge of the well and happily trotted off.
See, life is going to shovel dirt on you, all kinds of dirt. The trick to getting out of the well is to shake off, uh, the dirt and take a step up. And each of our troubles is a stepping stone. We can get out of the deepest wells of [00:06:00] our lives just by not stopping, never giving up. Just shake it off and just step up.
And then I love this part of the story. The donkey later came back and bit the farmer, who had tried to bury him, and the gash from the bite got infected, and the farmer eventually died in agony from septic shock. And the moral of today’s lesson is when you do something wrong and try to cover your ass, it always comes back to bite you.
Steve Davis: I’m glad we found that, David, ’cause that was an enjoyable little anecdote.
David Olney: It’s John C. Maxwell simultaneously at his best and most folksy. So it’s really good and kind of uncomfortable, but a really good story that helps get the essence of the message across very quickly, very clearly, with only a little bit of ick.
Steve Davis: Yes. And this whole concept, what is it? Let’s ground it now, this return on failure, because it’s … There’s some different things we’re gonna talk [00:07:00] about in principles, but for now, at a personal level, uh, there is that mindset of embracing failure as an investment, which is why you can get a return on the thing that you’ve gone through.
Just for me, at the time of recording, yesterday was my day from hell. Being a new owner of, uh, an electric vehicle, I hadn’t realized that the distance it says the battery, uh, can take your car gets severely shortened if you’re going uphill. And so I got caught short and had to get some roadside assistance to get me to the closest charging station Very frustrating.
But, and as much as I don’t really wanna share that story, John goes on and on about you gotta share those stories, not just for yourself to learn from, but from others. There’s a whole lot going on. David, you, you pick up the reins. What are the, the things that are sticking with you at a personal level with this book?
What lands?
David Olney: I, I think the really important thing that lands for [00:08:00] me is when you fail at something, the immediate thing is that sense of shame or disappointment or some combination of the two, and wanting to hide it. And really if you give in to those three things, you’re gonna miss the fact that you just found out something useful, and that is that whatever you did in its form doesn’t work.
Steve Davis: Mm-hmm.
David Olney: But how close to working was it? You also learn, well, there’s gotta have been a reason why you tried, and that reason might still be valid, and your motivation to try again is still there if you get past the awkwardness of failure. And the critically important thing is almost nobody, you know, lives on a desert island on their own and doesn’t have other people watching them or caring about them or wanting to learn from them.
For most of us, if we can handle failure a little bit better, then the people around us know it’s okay to say they’re worried. It’s okay to take a risk. It’s even [00:09:00] okay to fail.
Steve Davis: A- and I love, I forget who it was, he talked about a friend of his who, he had a son and a daughter, and around the dinner table every night, the, the first question, the first order of business was, “What did you fail at today?”
David Olney: Hmm.
Steve Davis: And they soon learned that their dad always celebrated their failures. There was only once or twice when he wasn’t that happy, and I think it was because it, it wasn’t approached in the right way. Hmm. But these two kids got to learn you don’t hide it, you talk about it, you embrace it, and that’s how you’ve got that fresh mind that’s able to look for the goodness in that failure.
David Olney: If I remember that bit of the book correctly, the only time the dad wasn’t happy is if it was a moral or ethical failure, and they hadn’t kinda realized yet that their behavior actually was, you know, off beam morally or ethically. As long as it was just practically they didn’t know how to do something yet, or didn’t have the [00:10:00] final tool or skill or experience, no problem.
Now we know what to help you get tomorrow. So really a great parenting tool in that, what did you have trouble with today? Well, we’ve just made it easier to work out what to focus on tomorrow.
Steve Davis: And save them from that horrible thing of going through school being too embarrassed to put your hand up.
David Olney: Yeah, and just shame becoming normal.
Steve Davis: Hmm.
David Olney: And yeah, shame to me seems to be the path towards extreme anxiety of what could go wrong next?
Steve Davis: Yes. That’s really what he’s doing. He is, um, dissecting shame away from- Getting it
David Olney: off the table.
Steve Davis: Yeah.
David Olney: Yeah.
Steve Davis: That is a great gift he’s just brought to the table.
David Olney: Yes.
Steve Davis: Hadn’t thought about it in that term. So the shh word, uh, he’s brought to the table.
Um, a couple of other things that I thought were useful. The message that’s co- uh, constantly through the book is to keep working on the successes, not just the failures. So he urges people to deliberately work on successes. So [00:11:00] amplify what went right-
David Olney: Mm …
Steve Davis: instead of getting stuck and obsessing over and over about what went wrong.
David Olney: Yeah. It’s this idea in a lot of the self-help literature that, you know, you can become the more rounded person you wanna be. You can, you can fix everything. And his argument is that, well, some things, just don’t be good at them. It, it may not be important that you can ride a unicycle. Have a second go if you really want, but the fact you can’t ride a unicycle for the second time, should you ever ride a unicycle ever?
It’s okay to double down on the fact you’re good at maths. It’s probably gonna take you further than the unicycle.
Steve Davis: I also loved, uh, seeing you brought sport into it. Not that unicycle-
David Olney: Is sport or else, isn’t it? Is
Steve Davis: there a unicycle race?
David Olney: I’m assuming- So- … there’s one somewhere on planet Earth.
Steve Davis: Yes. Um, I like him talking about a couple of, uh, baseball coaches.
It was either baseball or basketball or both, ’cause it’s gonna be folksy. Mm. You’re gonna have those sports in an American book. But I thought it was interesting, these really [00:12:00] high-performing coaches had this attitude that after a win or a loss, they’d let their team dwell on the loss or celebrate the success for 24 hours.
The, the clock started ticking. You got 24 hours. Go for it. Get it out of your system. Enjoy it. And then it’s back on focusing on next week and thinking, what have we learned? How do we apply? And the idea of this short celebration or, or commiseration and moving on is one of the core things in the book, and I guess that’s where we get a bit of Teflon on ourselves from being weighed down by failures.
Not to brush them under the carpet, but to not be weighed down by them.
David Olney: The other side of that coin, which comes up later in the book, is that whether you succeed or failure, the analysis you should do is exactly the same.
Steve Davis: Yes.
David Olney: What went well and why, what went badly and why, and [00:13:00] learn from it either way.
Because if you just repeat How you are successful today, well, tomorrow’s a different day. There might be different variables. If you haven’t analyzed today properly, even if it’s a success, there’s no guarantee without analyzing it properly that you can repeat it.
Steve Davis: As people here who may or may not be running businesses, just thinking about that a little bit more, how would we ground that as a final takeaway?
David Olney: Probably the biggest thing I think is whether it was a great day or a terrible day, don’t dwell on it for more than a day, and then do the analysis work about what happened, how did you contribute to what happened, how would you like to behave differently tomorrow to get a, you know, different or better outcome.
Like, that’s the absolute critical lesson, I think.
Steve Davis: And if we wanted to make this point, ’cause I found myself doing this as I read it, we had just [00:14:00] been talking about Jill Bolte Taylor’s book in the last episode, episode six of season eight, and Whole Brain Living. I was putting this through that filter because- Mm
you’ve had this hit of failure, no doubt, um, and some of this terminology might be strange to you if you haven’t listened to episode six. I really do think it’s one of the best episodes we’ve done and worth a listen. Your character too, that part of your brain that wants to protect you, is the one that’s likely to get stuck- Yes
and dwelling. And so what he’s saying in different words is what Jill asks for, is breathe, take a breath, reflect, and then have a bit of a brain huddle where you go around your different quadrants of the brain to say, “Right, we’ve had this reaction to this event that we didn’t want. What resources have we got?
What things can we do to move forward?” I think there’s a lot in common here in just using different language.
David Olney: Yeah. We go from essentially a neuroanatomist to a, a folksy business coach.
Steve Davis: Yes.
David Olney: And at the end of [00:15:00] the day, I’ll take the neuroanatomist every time, but I know there’s the people who are gonna understand the point more clearly with Maxwell.
Steve Davis: Enjoy next time you’re walking your donkey through the country. Know what’s in store.
Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps. Number two, principles. These are ideas worth building on. As Oscar Wilde reminded us, you can never be overdressed or over-educated
Steve Davis: David, in the principle segment, let’s bring the boat around to, to face fairly and squarely at the business, uh, application of Maxwell’s thinking. And there’s a lovely video, we’ll put a link to it in the show notes, where he takes an hour and a half to go through six principles that he draws from his book, and I think it gives [00:16:00] us an entry point.
David Olney: Or really a short version for our listeners who don’t have enough time for the whole book.
Steve Davis: That’s right. Well, interestingly, the book’s four and a half hours long. Mm. So it’s not that far short of
David Olney: the whole
Steve Davis: book. No, no. Um, but I want us, I want you to do, uh, an exercise for me. Can you please do this? Hold your hands out.
David Olney: Mm-hmm.
Steve Davis: Either side of you. No, long. Mm-hmm. That’s it. So David is spreading his arms
David Olney: out to the sides. I’m about to fly like an airplane.
Steve Davis: Yes. Uh, pretend that on one of your arms, I’m starting to push down.
David Olney: Mm-hmm.
Steve Davis: Do you think I would eventually have some success?
David Olney: Absolutely, because if you’re standing and I’m sitting, you’ve got more leverage, and it’s gonna work.
Steve Davis: Without knocking everything over, put your arms right in front of you and clasp your fingers together, uh, so they’re locked. Now hold your arms straight. Do you think you’d have more chance in holding your arms up if I was pushing down?
David Olney: Mm, I should be able [00:17:00] to with two shoulders. Yeah. But eventually, again, more leverage, you’re taller, you should still be able to win ’cause you could then use both hands as well.
Steve Davis: In the book, he uses this example to say … You can relax now. Thank you. Uh, I felt like a teacher then. He says you-
David Olney: Mr. Davis, Mr. Davis.
Steve Davis: Yes. You will … Uh, we’ll just wait. You can go to the toilet now, little David.
David Olney: Oh, exciting. On the floor?
Steve Davis: No. Um, he says you’ll have more chance holding against the, the force when your both arms are locked together.
And he’s making the point, in a very labored way, that if you keep failure and success together, you have more chance to succeed because success without failure creates pride, and failure without success destroys resilience. Discuss.
David Olney: I really like it when he uses the words, ’cause the physical exercise is weird.
Because if you were pushing one hand down, I would reach across, and I would bend one of your fingers backwards with my other hand
Steve Davis: Let’s [00:18:00] focus on the words
David Olney: then. But no, he’s absolutely correct. Any time we fixate on something emotional, whether it’s a big positive or a big negative, we lose that ability for balance, and when we lose that ability for balance, we normally lose the benefits or the lesson from whatever we’re experiencing.
Steve Davis: The second point that he makes, um, is about understanding good misses from bad misses. So sometimes you miss and it’s good.
David Olney: Mm.
Steve Davis: Sometimes it’s bad. Just before we expand on that, in his prelude to this in the video, he talks about when you’ve got a great excuse and how that is basically toxic. Let’s have a listen to him, Steve, if I remember, putting this into the show notes later when we edit.
Let’s have a listen.
John C Maxwell: Here’s a good miss. I tried something and, and it didn’t work, but I learned from it, and so I made adjustments. You see, in good misses, I make adjustments, I make corrections, I, I tweak it. [00:19:00] And a bad miss is when I make excuses. When, when I start making excuses for why I haven’t, couldn’t, shouldn’t, didn’t, I’m in trouble.
And by the way, a real good excuse is a real bad excuse. You, you know that, don’t you? That when you have a good excuse by why you haven’t done something, it’s so good you believe it, and you accept it, and other people believe it, and they accept it. And so now you live in a, in a world of excuses instead of adjustments, and you make a series of bad misses because you’re excusing yourself all this t- time instead of adjusting yourself.
David Olney: Good
Steve Davis: definition?
David Olney: I think it’s exceptionally good. And as I was listening to the book, it really reminded me of working out that the PhD was never gonna be finished, but all the skills I was gonna take away from it were going to make whatever I did next easier. So recognizing that fact and, and not getting overwhelmed [00:20:00] that, you know, you’ve, you’ve got all this value out of what you’ve done.
Steve Davis: Now, at the time of recording, I’ve had one of the most challenging weeks in business ever, uh, just from a, a whole pile of competing demands. And at the same time, I was listening to this book, and this bit resonated with me, and it was embrace hard. He basically makes the, the claim often That life is hard.
Hard is part of life. And I know we often say that, and it sounds a bit glib. You know, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. But the fact is, especially in 2026, but probably at all times, to create and run or maintain a business is not easy. Everything’s challenged all the time. You’ve got the market changing, you’ve got people you’re working with changing, you’ve got your own self-doubts, you’ve got opportunities, you’ve got competitors.
It’s a tough gig, and [00:21:00] he says gobble that up, doesn’t he?
David Olney: Yeah. A- again, it aligns with so much I’ve read and so much of what I’ve experienced, that the sooner you make peace with the fact that the vast majority of things will be hard, and a few things because of all the hard work you’ve done will be easier, the sooner you work out to just do the hard things, the more benefits you get.
So really, it’s the only rewarding way to function.
Steve Davis: And isn’t there a bit of stoicism in this where the stoics would say, there’s always gonna be tough things you have to deal with, so we’re going to- Mm … prime the pump by dressing in light clothes on a cold day.
David Olney: Exactly. Practice your worst days.
Steve Davis: Hmm. So there’s a mindset of…
This comes through, too, and it isn’t in the notes that we’ve made.
David Olney: Mm.
Steve Davis: That whole sense of we all have the feeling that if we push hard and have a success, the next day is easier.
David Olney: Mm.
Steve Davis: And he said, “No, that’s wrong thinking.” It just means the next day you’ve got more capacity to tackle what [00:22:00] comes next.
David Olney: Yeah, you’re better prepared.
And, and I would argue that, you know, in some ways he is wrong. The better prepared you are from working hard today, the more likely tomorrow that you won’t have to work any harder than today.
TV Ad: Mm-hmm.
David Olney: So working hard today gets you used to working hard every day, and eventually what you do, you know, repeatedly just becomes normal.
So someone else might suddenly say, “Your day looks hard.” Like when I start at 5:10 in the morning talking to people in m- you know, my American job, and then the day ends at maybe 7:00 PM, other people might look at it and go, “That’s hard.” But because I structure my day well, I do the first half of work, then do an hour of some sort of physical, you know, practice isometrics or yoga, then clean up and go and have something to eat, and sit under the veranda at Milk Bar and have a coffee, and then read for a bit or play for a g- you know, guitar for a bit, and then do the second half of my workday.
That day isn’t hard.
Steve Davis: Hmm.
David Olney: It might look hard from the outside, but it [00:23:00] really isn’t. It’s just my day.
Steve Davis: Oh, it sounds divine from this end, I can tell you that much. Number four, David, is anticipate failure, and by this he’s arguing that big goals require advance preparation for setbacks, so you’re not surprised when they happen.
This is like o- other side of that same coin, they’re peas in a pod, but it’s a nice way of framing it, to anticipate failure.
David Olney: Yeah, prior preparation prevents piss-poor performance.
Steve Davis: Yes. I mean, you don’t wanna aim for failure, but you have to know that it’s a thing.
David Olney: Assume that if you don’t think about it, you’ll, you’ll crash into it.
Like, you know, as a blind person, when I learned to use a cane, I learnt there’s a rule called the six minute or six month rule. You can either do something carefully for six minutes and do it safely, or you can rush and be stupid and take six months recovering in hospital. So choose whether you’d rather take six minutes now or six months to recover.
Steve Davis: Well, when you put it like that. Uh, number five in [00:24:00] this, encourage others with your failures. This is very important in business, especially if you’re the owner, the leader, is we want to present ourselves as bulletproof, uh, so that we don’t have any chinks in the armor, so that we, from a right perspective, we want to be that sense of constancy and completeness.
And he’s saying that’s actually not good because the people around you think you’re so perfect- The standard is so high they don’t want to admit where they fall short, and that’s the worst scenario you could come up with
David Olney: Yep. I’ve, I’ve learnt mentoring people over such a long period of time to tell them about failing at the PhD, to tell them about having to walk away from violin because of the pain in my wrist and having to go, “Well, what do I do now?
Well, I better take the PhD seriously.” You know, the more you can explain to people that things go [00:25:00] horribly wrong, even with best intentions and good effort, it’s really important to share those lessons ’cause it’s much better that people take away those lessons as the path to eventual success-
Steve Davis: Mm …
David Olney: than just thinking that magically you knew what to do and they’ve failed if they don’t know what to do, or they can’t emulate your success.
Steve Davis: So what do I gotta do? Do I have to let the guard down more? Is that what I’ve gotta do, David? Or-
David Olney: No, you, you have a balanced approach to things, and you try and calculate risk, and you don’t mind iterating. Like, I think you’re always in a hurry because you wanna get things done for everyone. So if, if anything, you know, you probably thunder ahead when you could just slow and do a little bit more iteration, but it’s always thoughtfully from what I can, you know, tell from the outside.
Steve Davis: Hmm. Well, let’s finish with part six, uh, of his six steps. Understand that the right response to failure brings the greatest benefits. So humility, [00:26:00] character, and wisdom, they’re the rewards of responding well.
David Olney: Yep.
Steve Davis: Not much to say about that. That’s a, that’s-
David Olney: And for once he didn’t overcook it by writing 400 words.
Steve Davis: So to finish the principle segment, I, I want, or we want to leave a couple of questions dangling, ’cause these are good. I’ll put them to you, David, uh, and you can kick ’em around, push ’em back When was the last time you did something for the first time? And when was the last time you did something for the last time?
Good questions.
David Olney: Yeah, they are. And because I make the deliberate choice to do things I haven’t done so that I remember to be careful and do things slow, like walking on, you know, the other side of the street or, or going somewhere I haven’t gone before just to practice my mobility skills. I’m always doing new things to maintain my sort of skills to safely live in the world being blind.
But I struggle to think when I did something for the last time. Like, that I found really hard to find [00:27:00] an answer for.
Steve Davis: I found one for me. I am never going driving in my EV without gazillions of extra capacity of distance at my disposal. So that’s, that is that, that side of the coin. That’s interesting. And
David Olney: again, prior preparation prevents piss poor performance.
Yes. You now have the fast charger wired into your garage.
Steve Davis: And I feel like th- I do a lot of things for the fir- I mean, this show I’m doing with Keith Connan- Mm … this mixture of songs and history in, in public at a very public event, it’s another first time. Mm. You could argue it’s iterative, but it’s also new and novel.
David Olney: Mm.
Steve Davis: So I feel like I do punish myself. I kind of wish there was a question, when were you able just to sit back and do something on repeat for a bit? That seems like amazingness.
David Olney: Yeah, ’cause m- more often than not, you realize if you’re paying attention, the world requires of you that you do things slightly differently.
Yes. So that would be the strangest day, in my opinion too- … where it looks the same as yesterday [00:28:00] and I could just coast.
Steve Davis: Uh, on that note, please wrestle with those questions yourself. Have a chat with someone close to you. When was the last time you did something for the first time? So that’s about staying fresh and keeping yourself out of ruts.
And when was the last time you did something for the last time? When did you say, “Nope, I’m not gonna keep hitting my head against that brick wall. We are changing.”
Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps. Number three, problems. These are the marketing challenges keeping you up at night. As Oscar said, we ask questions for the best reason possible. Simple curiosity, no hidden agenda, just genuine interest in what’s actually happening
Steve Davis: In the problem segment, David, it’s Meta. Gee, I really don’t like this company.
David Olney: I [00:29:00] only forgive them for being themselves because my AI glasses are useful.
Steve Davis: Yeah, there you go. There are people out there, crooks, who c- create groups or pages with dummy names that are meant to sound official, like copyright claim against your content, and they send you messages notifying you, “You gotta take this action.”
It’s a phishing scam. They’re trying to get you to log in somewhere so they can get your details and go to town on it. Well, I reported one of them and was surprised to come, to get a message back saying, “We’ve had a look, and this mes- this does not breach community standards.” They’re charading, David, in fakery, most likely in a phishing scam, and that does not breach Meta’s standards.
Do they use the Lord of the Flies as their basis for what good community is about, especially the last part of the novel?
David Olney: [00:30:00] Well, I have to assume that the Metaverse having failed, they’re now just moving it to the dark web. So- … I think it really is the last half of Lord of the Flies.
Steve Davis: I, I was perplexed by this.
I actually ran it through Perplexity, which is probably the best thing to do when you’re perplexed, and it said, “Oh, yeah. Well, here’s what they’re doing. The email I got was genuinely from Meta’s servers, but the partner request it notifies you about is a sophisticated scam. They create legitimate Meta business manager accounts with misleading names, like Business Partner Platform Program.”
Why can’t Meta’s system detect this? Ugh. ‘Cause
David Olney: then they’d have to hire humans and treat them with
Steve Davis: respect. Hmm. And they use them to su- send real partner requests triggering these authentic notifications. The email passes all the authentication because it legitimately comes from Facebook servers.
However, the requester, you know, joined the Meta Agency Partner Program or thereabout, is not Meta affiliated. And so they [00:31:00] basically exploit Meta’s system, they name it deceptively, and then you give them permissions, uh, et cetera, allowing them to hijack your ads or take control of your assets. But remember this, good people, that does not contravene Meta’s business and community standards.
The simple message is trust absolutely nothing in your inbox, in your Facebook account, in your Instagram account. Please bounce it off someone else whom you trust to get a second opinion, especially things that sound too good to be true.
David Olney: Meta is not your friend.
Caitlin Davis: Our four Ps. Number four, [00:32:00] perspicacity. Let’s examine a campaign from the past and ask, would it work today? As Oscar Wilde believed, our one duty to history is to rewrite it. So let’s see what we can learn
Steve Davis: Finally, in the Perspicacity segment, you had just said, David, Metro is not your friend. Well, another way to discover people who might not be your friend is if you go to the drive-in and you’re a little bit distracted coming back to eat your goodies, and you open a car door only to discover it’s the wrong car.
Uh, that’s the basis for an old ad from Ford Motor Company. I’m pretty sure it was an American TV ad, not one of ours, from it looks like the ’60s, ’70s, something circa around there. Let’s have a listen to it just in case you don’t get the full picture. This gentleman’s coming back, hopping in next to th- a woman who’s [00:33:00] not his partner- Woman
next to other people, uh, and getting spurned, um, even next to a young man who deflects his wrongly assumed amorous advances and so on and so forth. Let’s have a listen
TV Ad: Introducing the 1977 Ford Granada. I’m back, sweetheart.
Who are you? Well, I- Get out of my Cadillac.
Where’s my Granada?
Oh, my sweet, my pet, my- Ah! Oh, oh, oh, sorry. I thought this was my Cadillac. Well,
it’s my Mercedes, you, you animal.
Now, where were we?
What are you, some kind of weirdo? Uh,
no, uh, wrong car. Get out of
here.
One way to tell Granada from Cadillac and Mercedes is its sticker price. When America needs a better idea, Ford puts it on wheels.
Steve Davis: So there’s the Ford Granada ad people jumping in and out of the wrong car, uh, because, you know, that’s not confusing, but you can believe the [00:34:00] claims they’re making. That’s the point they’re trying to say. David, would this ad Work in 2026
David Olney: I think if you ran this ad today, you’d have to run it with trigger warnings.
Steve Davis: Yeah.
David Olney: It, it would not be well-received by anyone anywhere, I think, anymore.
Steve Davis: And that’s just… Why?
David Olney: Because what is portrayed as social awkwardness in a world without social media would now probably result in you get in the car, the next thing, the person’s got their phone out, they’re filming your distress, and it goes viral on the internet, and you hide under a rock for the next 10 years.
Steve Davis: Yeah, the, the storyline doesn’t hold up-
David Olney: No …
Steve Davis: in this thing. So it’s not often we come to a decision quite so quickly, but I think you’re right. I think time has moved on. Should it have moved on? Should this still work?
David Olney: Social awkwardness should always be forgivable if it’s someone just making a mistake. And- We’ve lost something very important by not easily forgiving [00:35:00] social awkwardness.
Steve Davis: Yes. Now, this, ah, perfect, because something that Mr. Maxwell does, John C. Maxwell, in the book we’ve been talking about earlier, he often says the best way to go through life when someone does something that lets you down is to adopt a learner mindset, which takes us back to another book we talked about a couple of seasons ago, Judger Mindset, uh, Sets versus Learner Mindset.
The difference is a judger mindset will assume you had wrong intentions, bad intentions, uh, or, uh, inept. Mm. Whereas a learner mindset is more curious. Oh, see now, with the last book, the lear- the judger mindset is typically going to be character two-
David Olney: Yep …
Steve Davis: uh, going, protection, this is horrible, they’re being bad.
Whereas the, the learner mindset is more, um, character- It’ll be
David Olney: character four, more than likely
Steve Davis: Or four or three. I, I, uh, uh, it’s straddling there somehow. Yeah.
David Olney: It’s certainly gonna be right brain, but I [00:36:00] think it’s gonna be more-
Steve Davis: It’s
David Olney: curiosity … it’s curiosity, and it doesn’t mind multiple steps and effort.
Steve Davis: Yes.
David Olney: It’s more effort than fun, but learning can be fun, too. Yeah. So character four with some three involved, if necessary.
Steve Davis: So we’ve got that, and again, listen to the episode, uh, six of this season to understand what the heck we talked about there. But that learner mindset, which Maxwell talks about in the book, would actually make this ad work if we still had that as a society.
John C Maxwell: Mm.
Steve Davis: I feel we haven’t. We would rather paint that person’s intentions as wrong and evil and mischievous- Mm … and, uh, applying, uh, their privilege, uh, as a young white man just going from door to- And doing as he
David Olney: pleases.
Steve Davis: Yeah Yes. And we would have a judger mindset instead of a learner mindset. Mm. Which gets in the way of comedy, which gets in the way of telling human stories But you can’t do all of [00:37:00] that in 30 seconds, can you?
The, the world would need to shift quite a bit to get back to be able to take that at face value.
David Olney: Well, the problem is now we do everything in 30 seconds, which is why so many humans are running on judger mindset. Yes. ‘Cause the only way humans can run at this pace is to stop learning and start judging.
Judging’s fast. Learning takes time.
Steve Davis: Talking of time, my car’s charged now. David, let’s go for a drive.
David Olney: Absolutely.
Caitlin Davis: Thanks for listening to Talking About Marketing. If you found this helpful, please share it with someone who might benefit, and if you’re so inclined, leave a rating in your podcast app. Both help more than you think. Steve and David welcome your thoughts, which you can send to [email protected].[00:38:00]
That’s [email protected]. Want to continue the conversation beyond the podcast? You can book 20 minutes with Steve at talkedaboutmarketing.com. No cost, no obligation. And we’ll leave the last word to Oscar Wilde, “There’s only one thing worse than being talked about, and that’s not being talked about.”