Morgan: Hey everyone, welcome to the latest episode of Client Horror Stories, and I’m excited to have with me the one and only Ron Reich today. How are you doing, Morgan?

Ron: I am fine, thank you. It’s good to be here.

Morgan: I’m excited to have you here. I enjoyed our prep call and now the moment has finally arrived. And with that, I have my whiskey in hand and I’m ready to go. And let’s take it away with today’s crazy story while I get drunk here.

Ron: Fair. Fair enough. How do you want me to start?

Morgan: Jump right into the story is my favorite way. I personally never like these podcasts where the person being interviewed spends the first 40 minutes saying, “It was a cold and snowy night in January 1976.” Right?

And me tells their whole life story. I go, I like jumping into the action, which, by the way, there’s this ancient Latin rhetorical term for this: in medias res, which literally means “in the middle of things,” and it’s one of my favorite storytelling techniques.

Ron: You know, where I’ll start is I’ll back up just a little bit just to give it a little bit of context. I started my career all those years ago in HR, and HR was fine. It was fun. It was okay. It wasn’t a big passion of mine or anything like that.

And very, again, just to make a long story short, I ended up at an HR consulting firm with some friends of mine. We stayed open for, I don’t know, five, six, seven years, whatever it was. Shut the doors for a number of reasons.

And out of nowhere—I was going through a divorce. I had nowhere to go except to move back in with my mom and dad. Out of nowhere, I got a telephone call from a guy in Dallas, Texas. I’m in New Jersey.

“I know who you are. I tracked you down. I have a job with Toshiba. It is the opposite of who you are or what you are.”

Morgan: Wait, but by the way, I just need to interrupt, which is we were just talking about starting a story in medias res. Usually, in I’ve done maybe 80 Client Horror Stories episodes, and usually it’s like you build up, build, build, build up the background of the story until like someone scary calls you up and says, “I know who you are.”

Now, one minute in, it’s like the horror picture beginning with the call. “I know who you are and where you live.”

Ron: I know who you are. That’s right. And, you know, the job is the opposite of what you are. They’re looking for somebody with a lot of training and some HR. You have a lot of HR and some training. I will get you in front of them.

Your job, Ron, get them to flip their competencies and have them help you become a good trainer, facilitator.

I went in, I talked with them, and they decided to do that. Morgan, I have never been so excited in all my life. I mean, it was just like training was something I always wanted to get into.

I can be really good at this. Oh my goodness, this is the greatest thing.

Got off to a really good start. Things are going well. This is so many years ago that we were called the Electronic Imaging Division at Toshiba, and it was copiers and faxes. It was all those years ago.

Morgan: I know. Sometimes I wonder if faxes still exist.

Ron: I think so.

I was supposed to do a five-day sales training, product knowledge sales training class. I knew the sales training piece real well. The selling skills, I don’t deny, and this was one of my big mistakes.

I didn’t know the products as well as I should have.

Class starts Monday. On the morning of day three, Wednesday, two guys from Philadelphia walked out.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” essentially is what they said.

I got a telephone call about an hour and a half later from my boss’s boss in California, who tore me to shreds. Just tore me to shreds.

“What’s going on? People are walking out of your class and Tony’s going crazy.”

And I was like, “I blew it. I blew it. I’m gonna get fired. This is the greatest job I could have ever come across. I have blown it.”

And I mean, there was just nowhere I could go with this, and I really didn’t want to. I mean, I felt so terrible.

And again, I mean, I’ll fast-forward it through it, Morgan, and again, of course we can talk about it in more depth.

What I ended up doing—first of all, the people I was training were not Toshiba employees. We had a network of dealers that sold our products. So these were not my direct colleagues. They worked at a dealership outside of Philly.

I called the dealer owner in Philly. He essentially refused to talk to me. He was just like, “You know, you’re no good. These people said you don’t know what you’re doing and I’m never going to send anybody to any Toshiba training again.”

And I was like, “All right, all right. I’m a dead man walking here.”

Morgan: So I have a question at this point. I want to understand the situation a little bit better. Since you were living with your parents, it sounds like it wasn’t yesterday, but so now with some retrospect, like, were you that bad? And what actually went wrong that led to—

Ron: I wasn’t prepared. And that was the deal. And that’s the biggest lesson I learned from this whole thing.

To pull the story through, I kept talking to Walter, again, the president of this dealership, and I would call him maybe once a month, every six weeks, whatever it might be.

And I was like, “Listen, how about if we do this? Will you send one person? Just send one person to a training class that I’m going to facilitate. We won’t charge you for it. You know, it’s on the house, as it were.”

He finally relented. He goes, “You know what? I’ll send one person, one, and you better prove yourself,” or whatever it was.

He said that person came, class went well. Talked to him, and he was like, you know, he said they did this individual, you know, John, whatever his name was, said he got a lot out of it.

Maybe I’ll keep doing this.

He started to send more and more people, and it turned out to be—we developed a very nice relationship. I’m not going to sit here and tell you, “Oh, we became best friends and we go to dinner.” None of that happened, and that’s not the point.

What I learned from this whole thing was that from that day forward, when they walked out and Tony tore me up, I am never walking into a classroom again unprepared.

I will never do it because it was one of the biggest mistakes of my life. And, per the title of your show, I was the horror story. I was the horror story. It was on me, and I’m never going to let that happen again.

Morgan: So, what’s so powerful—short story. There are a few interesting angles that are worth taking apart.

One is something that I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten older. I’m 49, older than I seem, is I feel like when I was younger, also like 20, 30 years old, I never felt the need to prepare.

I felt so confident in my abilities. I would just walk into any room and say, “Oh, I could wing it.” I thought I was a master at winging it.

Ron: Yeah.

Morgan: And I think something that life experience has taught me is that no matter how good you are at winging, or how good you think you are at winging it, a little bit of preparation goes a really, really, really long way.

Ron: No doubt. No doubt. I have not walked into a classroom unprepared again.

And I think about this. A mentor of mine made a comment to me years ago that also resonated with me. He was saying to me, he goes, “Ron, I expect you to be at your best every single moment you are in front of a group.”

Reason for that: what you are covering, what you are going over, what you are talking about is important to somebody in that room at all times. It’s not going to be important to everybody. It will be important to somebody.

And therefore, you need to be at your best every moment.

And I never forgot that. And I was like, “Wow, Rich, that’s really powerful.”

And again, I don’t want to be the nightmare where I’m unprepared for any segment of anything I’m doing because that’s not fair to anybody. That’s not fair to you. It’s not fair to your listeners. It’s not fair to anybody who’s attending any classes that I’m going to, anything like that.

Morgan: I’ll add to that. I agree with all that. Great points. I’ll add to that.

I found this tendency to underprepare and thus lead to disasters like this especially prevalent among really smart people.

Because what I’ve noticed is people who are just average intelligence, they’re like, “Oh my god, I don’t know this thing. I need to do my homework and get ready.”

But people who happen to be really smart, that always did their homework in two seconds their entire life because—

Ron: Yeah.

Morgan: “I know. Like, I’m the smartest one in the room. Of course I can. Of course I can wing it.”

Ron: Yeah.

Morgan: “I never need to do my homework.”

Like, those are the ones that underprepare and are sometimes caught blindsided.

Ron: That’s right. That’s exactly right.

And you know, it’s interesting too when you talk about preparation. One of the most significant conversations of my career was with an old boss of mine at a pharmaceutical company.

We were going over my review. We were talking about my increase, my bonus, and that I was happy with everything. And I made an off-hand comment to him about my colleague David, and I was like, “Joe, David is so well-rounded, and I just respect him so much. He’s got so much knowledge,” and so forth.

And Joe said to me, you know, he said, “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this.” He said, “I respect your preparation. I really, really do.”

He said, “You prepare so meticulously, at times I think you overprepare.”

And his point to me was, “You don’t have to be perfect in every single piece. You don’t, Ron.”

He said, “What I would rather see you do: prepare thoroughly, no two ways about it, except take the extra time when you’re not preparing. Start reading. Start just start becoming more well-rounded.”

And I took that to heart, Morgan. And over the past 23, 24 years, whenever he told me that, I’ve read over 400 leadership books.

And that is such a big part of preparing. That is such a big part of allowing me to be flexible so that if somebody asks a question that has nothing to do with the topic or is off on a tangent, nine times out of 10 I’ve read something about it and I can at least offer some sort of response or offer a book recommendation, whatever it might be.

Morgan: This reminds me of a comment that someone once made about me, the following.

I said, “Morgan, any subject that comes up, you’re instantly able to figure out a really, really smart, perfect response to it.”

And I figured out how you do it.

So I responded to this person, “Please tell me. I want to know how you do it.”

And the response was very insightful about my personality, which was—they said, “You actually spend all your time thinking about every possible thing that could be said or that could happen and then thinking through the optimal response.”

So what really happens is you’ve pre-thought everything. So it seems like you’re really good at winging and improvising when you’re really just overprepared because your brain never stops.

To which I responded, that’s completely true and not all humans are like that. And I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or an insult, but I chose to interpret it as a compliment.

Ron: Oh, I take it as a compliment because I know someone who’s very much like that. And that would be me.

I just am a believer in that. And again, I’m a believer in contingency planning.

I’ve been doing this for 32 years, and every single time I’m getting ready for a class, I still think about, okay, how am I going to set this particular activity up?

What am I, you know, we have nine people in the class, so we’ll do—we need three groups. Three, three, and three. Fine.

What am I going to do if only eight people show up? Well, we’ll just make it four and four.

And what if somebody challenges me? What if somebody doesn’t agree? What if somebody just—all of these different things?

And for me, I’ll speak for myself. I think that gives me a lot more credibility when I can walk in a room.

“Okay guys, here’s the first activity. We’re going to break into three groups. You three, you three, and you three.”

Not, “Okay, let’s see. We have nine. So I guess we’ll do three, three, and three.”

No, I’m ready. I’m ready.

And the other thing I think that allows me to do is that if I do make a mistake, people accept it because, okay, he made a mistake. It’s okay. It’s not that he’s unprepared or not that he’s winging it or whatever it might be.

So, again, it’s that win-win for everybody.

Morgan: Okay. All of those are very useful.

So, what I also wonder—actually, before that, I wanted to mention I love your mention of contingency plan because I feel like you and I are very similar.

I also do the same, and one of my favorite marketing and business in general strategies is to focus on the downside risks and eliminating them.

Said differently: what is success? Here’s one definition of success: not failing.

So, if you want to succeed, eliminate all possible ways you could fail.

How do you do that? Well, just think about whatever it is you’re doing. And then here’s a question I ask myself every day when I’m obsessing over a project or a goal.

I say, if five years from now this project has completely failed, what is the most likely cause of that that has its roots today?

And then I work on that today.

And then if you basically, said differently, if you find the reasons for failure, rank them by like how severe it is times the probability, let’s say, and then you’re always eliminating—you spend some, you know, a few weeks, months, years changing the strategy, changing this, that to eliminate the top reason, then the second top reason, then the third top reason, the fourth reason.

Eventually, when you’ve eliminated all the not unlikely paths for failure, guess what? You’re the only option you’re left with is succeeding.

Ron: That’s right. Yeah. You know, for me, one of the things I like to do, probably one of my biggest mantras is I try very, very hard to stay out of the results business and not worry about the actual results that take place.

What I like to do, and again, we’re going to go back to the preparation piece: as long as I can say to myself before I start anything—the interview right now, you know, I’m doing a session in Manhattan tomorrow and Thursday—am I fully, fully, fully prepared? Am I ready to do this?

Yes, I am fully prepared. I went over our information before that, you know, before our session.

Now, all these things—and as long as I have fully prepared, the results will take care of themselves. It will be okay. They’re going to go where they’re going to go.

I have no control over the ultimate result. That’s up to other people.

As long as, again, I’m not that nightmare in front of them, so be it.

Morgan: I like that. I like that. Said differently: training, practice, preparation, all these things are wildly underrated.

On the one hand, you often hear coaches always say you need to practice, practice, practice. There’s the old saying, the way to Carnegie Hall is practice.

But we also live in a get-rich-quick sort of era.

Ron: Yes.

Morgan: And it’s interesting. It reminds me of a classic story—different versions of this attributed to lots of famous people.

But one version of a classic, probably apocryphal comment is attributed to Picasso, where someone came up to a restaurant, asked him to draw something, and he drew out a napkin.

And the person said, “Oh, can I buy it? How much?”

He was like, “$1 million.”

And he was like, “$1 million? It took you one second to draw it.”

And he was like, “Yeah, 40 years of practice in one second.”

Ron: That’s right.

Morgan: And that’s exactly right. Like, the way to become so good that you avoid a lot of these pitfalls, downsides, problems is just practice.

Preparation, preparation, preparation.

Ron: Well, no. I mean, I’ll make a comment to that because I’m on board with that.

And it’s interesting because when people ask me now what my fee structure is and I give it to them, there are times where it’s like, “Whoa.”

And it’s like, well, you know, you’re getting 32 years of experience. You’re getting the 400 books that I’ve read. You’re going to get all of the preparation.

And I can say proudly to you, and I say it proudly to you right now, Morgan, I’m good at what I do. I know what I’m doing.

And so, you’re going to get my best and I deserve to get paid for that.

And if you’re looking for the quick fix or you want, “No, I’m going to go with a cheaper alternative,” go right ahead. And I’m dead serious with that. I really, really am.

Like, you don’t want to work with me, so be it. I can’t change that except I’m not going to drop my price just because you want me to. That’s not going to work for me.

Morgan: Right. There’s an interesting subtlety to this also that I just realized in real time now, thinking about the Picasso apocryphal anecdote, which is this thing happens in humans, I think.

When you’re so prepared, you spend 40 years of your life preparing, then you feel like you can relax. You’re like, dude, I’m so good at it. Like, I don’t need to prepare anymore. Dude, I’ve been preparing 40 years. I’m awesome. Yeah, come to me in the restaurant and I’ll draw you something amazing.

But I actually think this is like a flaw of human nature because the unfortunate answer, I think at least from my experience, is you literally can never stop preparing.

That no matter how good you are, you have to keep on practice, practice, practice to stay at the top of your game. You stop for days for some tiny amount of time and boom, the spark starts going away.

My brain will turn to mush quickly.

Ron: I mean, it will. And I mean, there’s a quote attributed to Joe Paterno from Penn State, and he said one time, “If you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse.”

And that makes sense to me because your competition is getting better. Your competition is getting better. So, if you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse.

And I will tell you, you know, I said what a voracious reader I am. I have been really busy over the past month or so and I haven’t been reading as much as I like to, and I just started another book just to show you I’m not kidding around.

Now there it is. Over the past two days I’ve read about 50 pages. I like to read between 10 and 15 pages a day, five days a week.

And all of a sudden my mind is turning again in a good way. You know, I’m thinking again. I’m thinking again.

Morgan: Yes, that’s right. That’s right. That reminds me of—and I’ve got to mention that in the class this week.

Ron: And there it is. There it is.

Morgan: So stopping to prepare for even a little bit after four years of preparation like, “Oh, I can slow down a little.”

You stop training your body—like, as I love the Joe Paterno quote. My personal trainer’s version of that is like muscles, if you stop exercising the muscles, they literally start dying or getting weaker.

So it’s a version of the same.

Ron: Exactly. Yeah.

Morgan: But here is a way in which it gets even more interesting because it’s not just that you need to train your muscles, train your body, train your mind, and the moment it stops, it starts going down.

More than that, while you do that, the world around you is always changing.

Ron: That’s right.

Morgan: So, no matter what the profession is, every single profession has changed tremendously in the last, say, 40 years.

The Picasso example, if you’re a painter, like now, dude, there are digital technologies. There are different paint materials, types of brushes, everything that just didn’t exist 40 years ago.

So if you stop training 40 years ago, then you can’t use all the new realizations, ways of doing things, ways of improving things from the last 40 years.

And I’m using painting because it’s this example, but it applies to every profession.

So, stopping prep—what we’re realizing in this conversation, I like this because I never quite thought about it this way.

I realized this before in this clear of a way that stopping preparation not just do you stop keeping your body fine-tuned or your mind fine-tuned so it starts weakening, but as you slow down, the world around you doesn’t slow down.

Ron: So that’s exactly it. I mean, that’s exactly it.

And I mean, someone asked me the other day, “Ron, do you still have anything to bring to the table? Do you have anything that you can contribute to the younger people who were out there?”

And I was like, yeah. Yeah. And again, I say proudly, I’ve got a lot to contribute.

I’ve got—oh, you know, I can—how to listen effectively, how to give feedback effectively, what emotional intelligence is. We can go through just all of these different skills.

And the point for me is they can learn from me, and I absolutely need to learn from them because they’ve got all the technical skills that I know very little about, and I need their help, and I welcome their help.

And to me, that’s how it works.

I think when you’re young, you have energy, but you don’t have wisdom. When you’re old, you have wisdom without energy.

And then there’s this middle ground where, like, you may have a bit less strength every day, but you’re still strong in the middle and you have a bit more wisdom. Like this works like this.

You have a bit more wisdom every day.

Morgan: So, at this midpoint between being too young and too old, you have a very healthy mix.

And I feel like this is one of the subtexts of your point about the advice you give to younger people: that they have energy to figure out all the new tools, techniques, and so on and teach it to you, but you have the wisdom that you’re able to pass on to the younger folks.

Ron: That’s right. When people realize that, when people realize that you’re sincere, that you’re genuine, it changes the relationship. It changes everything.

I mean, I’m reminded of—I did a class one time in Philadelphia, and we had finished. It was a Friday afternoon. People had left and it’s maybe 4:30, you know, whatever it was.

There was one participant left in the room and she came up to me. She goes, “Ron, do you mind if I ask you something?”

And I was like, “No, not at all. Go ahead.”

And it was something to do with work, a problem she was having, whatever it was. And we talked for about a half an hour or so.

And she looked at me, and after about like 20 minutes, she’s like, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. We’re finished. Everybody has left. You’re not getting paid to do this, and you’re sitting here talking to me.”

And I was like, “Of course I am.”

And she was like, “Well, for what reason?”

And I was like, “Twofold. Number one, I like to think that I’m a nice guy, so I’m glad to help. I do have a selfish motive, and I deny that to no one.”

I said, “If I can help to make you better, somehow, some way down the road, that’s going to come back and help me.”

Because if you’re better, you’re going to be better at what you do. And as my wife and I enter our golden years, you’ll be able to help us because it’ll come full circle.

So what possible reason do I have not to help you?

Morgan: Yeah. And it’s not just that that particular person can help you. This is also true in a cosmic sense, where, like, in the karma sense of passing on the sort of wisdom to the next generation, then other people in that next generation will help you as well.

Ron: Yeah. Well, Stephen Covey said one time, you know, the Seven Habits, and I’m so blessed to be certified to teach that. And I mean, I love it.

And he made the comment one time. He said, “I want the Seven Habits to endure long, long, long after I’m gone.”

And he died now about—I don’t even know—15 years ago. It’s been a while.

They’re enduring. They’re enduring. And he’s making a difference still for future generations, and that will continue to happen.

Morgan: Okay. So, I’m in a fun mood. So, I want to shake it up a bit.

As an intellectual exercise, purely for fun, I’m wondering if now you and I can argue against ourselves.

Ron: Okay.

Morgan: And by that I mean, we both of us have been making this really strong, interesting, and surprising case about the power of preparation to avoid horror stories like the one you started this episode with.

Can we say, like, are we wrong? Are there times not to prepare?

And I want to tell you why I thought of this, which is I have a saying of mine that I just realized now kind of contradicts my obsession with preparation and infrastructure.

As Walt Whitman’s words, you know, “I am large. I contain multitudes.”

So maybe I do contradict myself sometimes, but I admit it. I’m open.

Which is, I sometimes say, I never want to take a class from a teacher who can’t teach that class unless he’s prepared.

And what I mean by that is, like, the people that come in and just memorize every little detail and know the manual memorized and then can recite it back to you, they haven’t internalized it.

But wisdom, age, experience—what I found has happened in my career is, as you become so good in certain areas, it becomes so internalized too that I can walk into any marketing conversation, anything, with no prep and have instant—I know the right anecdote, the right strategy. I’ve seen these sort of situations before.

I can put these pieces together in a way that’s kind of magical, and I actually value that about myself. It’s this power sort of—I don’t know—business consulting improvisation that I do, and I love it.

But it’s kind of the opposite of my other side of my personality, to be overprepared.

Do you see that paradox that I’m pointing out?

Ron: I do. I absolutely do.

And you know, for whatever reason, my memory sometimes I can pull stuff up from so, so, so many years ago.

Statistics professor from my undergrad—his notes, Morgan, were yellow. They were yellow.

They were written on white paper and they were yellow because he never changed them. He never updated them.

People told me, “You go into Dr. Hill’s class, he’s going to tell the story about…” And these were people who had graduated from school many years before.

Sitting there and he’d come, “Let me tell you a story about…” And I was like, “Oh, you just repeat the same story. He’s been doing the same stuff for 35 years now, or the exact same thing.”

And it’s—it just—I don’t. My point is I don’t want to be robotic. I need to know the material. I don’t want to be robotic.

And the other thing I’ll say here is that by preparing, it also allows me to be ready to go in different directions.

And I’m thinking in particular about my niece right now, Kate. Kate’s a professor in Manhattan.

Morgan: You’re watching this.

Ron: Yeah, I hope she is.

Morgan: It’s me. Look, you’re famous.

Ron: It really is your goofy Uncle Ron.

She’s a professor in Manhattan, and she said to me one day, “Uncle Ron, if I’m going to be really good at what I do, I need to understand the material on a much, much deeper level than the students.”

And I never forgot that. That made so much sense to me.

I can’t know the material just on a surface level. If I’m going to present it and I’m going to present it well, I need to understand it deeply and I need to be able to make connections to other material or other classes, whatever it might be.

I mean, like I said, I don’t want to walk in there robotically because people know that.

I mean, people say, “Yeah, here he goes. Here comes his speech. There. Here comes the half-an-hour lecture from Ron again.”

And that’s not the reputation I want to have, and that’s no fun for me either.

Morgan: So, yeah, that all makes sense. And hi, Kate.

When I said I don’t like taking classes from people that need to prepare, what I didn’t mean to say—I didn’t mean to imply that they know it robotically so they could repeat it like they’re just like an AI or reading a book because they have it all memorized.

What I meant is more to Kate’s point that once it’s deeply internalized, you can then improvise on top of it.

It’s a little bit like playing piano.

Ron: Exactly.

Morgan: Right. Yeah. Like it’s like playing piano or playing any instrument in order to do jazz improvisation.

It’s not just you need to have a zillion songs memorized in a rote way. Okay, you can play this étude. Great.

But once you really understand how music goes, yeah, these combinations of sounds work together, then in real time you can say, okay, I have these sounds, then after that, that sounds, then descending fifth, then like this.

And you can only improvise once you’ve internalized it.

So what I was actually trying to get at is about the level of internalization, which brings out this sort of interesting paradox because once you’ve done it so well and so much for years, you’ve internalized it that you don’t need the notes.

But still keeping the notes and going back to it is what separates the lazy genius from the successful professional.

Ron: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. I believe that with all my heart.

I mean, I have my leader’s guides for the majority of my classes that I present or that I facilitate memorized.

And it’s just because I’ve done them so often, except my notes contain add-ons. They contain little different phrases that I’ve learned over the years and that kind of stuff.

And I’ll tell you right now, Morgan, for me, I believe absolutely that’s one of the things that separates me from other people.

It’s just not, “Here’s the material.”

No, here’s the material, and here’s something I read two weeks ago that adds to it.

And just those kinds of things, it keeps it fresh for them. It keeps it fresh for me.

And it’s just—yeah. It’s more fun for everybody. It’s a win-win.

Morgan: Okay. I like it. I like it. I like the direction that this podcast took.

We ended up focusing on one aspect of your story, the power of preparation, but I never had an episode really diving into this aspect before.

So I’m happy that we take the time out to really think through how even when you’re at the top of your game, when you’re both up and coming and at the top of your game, you still need to do your skills.

Ron: And the need for practice never goes away. It’s part of the human condition.

Morgan: That’s right. And with that, Ron—or now that I learned your niece calls you, you’re the goofy Uncle Ron.

I love it. I love it. Thank you for coming. It’s been a pleasure getting to know you and diving into this topic.

And everyone that’s watched this episode until the end, I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as we have.

Until next time.