John Jantsch (00:01.218)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Kyle Austin Young. He’s an award winning strategy consultant, speaker and writer who helps leaders, entrepreneurs and high achievers accomplish big, meaningful goals. His work centers on a unique decision-making and goal achievement framework that he calls probability hacking, a method designed to analyze and intentionally improve the odds of success in any pursuit. We’re going to talk about his newest book.

Success is a numbers game. Achieve bigger goals by changing the odds. So Kyle, welcome to the show.

Kyle Austin Young (00:37.348)

Thank you for having me. Honored to be here.

John Jantsch (00:39.278)

So I’m going to start with the premise that I’m sure you, I won’t be the first person to ask this question. I think a lot of times when people talk about goals, they think about hustle or mindset or heck even luck. You are saying it’s more about odds. What’s different in that shift?

Kyle Austin Young (00:59.15)

Yeah, let me give you sort of an example. Let’s say that we’ve set the goal of training to run a marathon. Let’s say that’s something that we’ve decided we want to accomplish and we hire a running coach and she says, I can get you ready in time, but you’re gonna have to do three things. I need you to eat, sleep, and train according to some specific regimens that I’m gonna create for you.

John Jantsch (01:02.872)

me

John Jantsch (01:14.829)

Mm-hmm.

Kyle Austin Young (01:16.334)

So let’s say that we know that one of these prerequisites is we’re to have to train according to some certain parameters. And so we identify some of the things that could go wrong, some of the things that might happen instead of what we want. And maybe we identify bad weather as something that could derail a training regimen. I’m currently preparing for a big wintery snowstorm. Let’s say that we identify injury as a potential risk, or maybe we identify that our kids might have a crisis that could overwhelm our schedule. So the question that I like to ask people is,

tell me how wanting to run a marathon is an antidote to any of those threats to our success. How does wanting to run a marathon change the weather? How does wanting to run a marathon prevent injury? How does wanting to run a marathon keep a crisis from happening in our kids’ lives? Certainly, we’re going to need a measure of commitment and hustle in order to be successful. But ultimately, what we’re going to really need is we need some creative solutions to the things that could keep us from getting what we want.

So I believe that we can understand probabilities similar to the way we’ve traditionally understood matter. It can’t be created or destroyed, but it can be transferred and rearranged. The odds of success, the odds that we want for our goal are currently hiding in our potential bad outcomes. When we identify what those things are and what we can do about them, we can tilt the odds in our favor.

John Jantsch (02:30.488)

So it’s all about quantum physics. Is that what you’re saying? So when you talk about moving matter around, was the first thought I had. Sure.

Kyle Austin Young (02:33.54)

Very little physics in the book. I don’t think I’ve ever taken a physics class.

Kyle Austin Young (02:40.418)

Well, I do think that there’s a lot of truth in the idea that a lot of people want to conjure good odds out of thin air. This idea that maybe I can wish myself into a better position. And I don’t think that’s true. I think that a lot of times when we’re pursuing a goal, we’re encouraged to think positive. Don’t worry about what could go wrong. If it’s meant to happen, it’ll happen. Just focus on the positive. I encourage people to do the exact opposite. I tell people to think negative. I tell people, for everything that has to go right in order for you to get what you want, identify the potential bad outcomes. Identify the things that could happen instead of what you want.

John Jantsch (02:55.8)

Thank

Kyle Austin Young (03:09.464)

and use your creativity to systematically de-risk your goals.

John Jantsch (03:13.826)

So in your bio, and I know in the book itself, you talk a lot about probability hacking. So let’s talk about what that is or how you define

Kyle Austin Young (03:22.916)

Yeah, I define probability hacking as doing exactly what we just did. It starts with getting an idea of what’s going to have to go right and then identifying what could go wrong and then looking for creative solutions. I’ll tell a different example. You know, when I first graduated from college, I wasn’t excited about the entry level positions that I was seeing. I wanted to try for something more ambitious. So I actually applied to become the product development director at a growing health organization. I was 21 years old. If hired, I was going to be managing people in their 50s, 60s, 70s, people with PhDs and master’s degrees.

a crazy thing to do, but I got an interview and I wanted to make the most of it. So even at that time, I did what I essentially do now for a living. I created what I call a success diagram. I only needed to get a job offer at that point. That was the only step left, but I looked at what are the potential bad outcomes that could happen instead of me getting that job offer. And so I identified three. And so I’m giving this example. You kind of had the quantum physics concern because there’s no numbers here. I’m just going to show you how we can do this at a story level. One of the risks I identified was they might not hire me because of how young I looked.

John Jantsch (04:15.054)

Bye.

Kyle Austin Young (04:21.54)

I might walk in and they take one look and say, he can’t lead this team. So one of the very practical things I did to combat that is I just grew a beard. I still have the beard today. It was something that made me look about 10 years older than I was. And I knew that if I could do that, it would maybe take the edge off of that concern a little bit. A second bad outcome that I identified, a potential bad outcome rather, was there might be concerns over my lack of experience, which were valid. I didn’t have a deep resume. I had just graduated from college. So what I did was I couldn’t lie. I wasn’t going to

John Jantsch (04:22.126)

Right.

Kyle Austin Young (04:49.54)

pretend that I had experience I didn’t have, but I wanted to show the quality of my thinking. So I actually typed up a plan for how I was going to turn this department around. It was so thick, I had to have it spiral bound. It was a book. And every person I went to and interviewed with, I gave them a copy of it. And the goal was when they would ask me questions about my past, I would just redirect it to be a conversation about the future. What experience do you have with whatever the case might be, product development? Great question. Here’s my plan for product development. Let’s talk about the vision that I have for this role if I’m given the opportunity.

The third potential bad outcome I identified was maybe they would be concerned that I couldn’t really get along with the existing team because there was just such a big generational gap. So I used a strategy that I’m still using today. It’s worked really well for me. I asked one of the people in the organization if the product development team had read any books recently as a group. She listed a few titles, I think it was three or four, and I went out and read every single one of them. And what that did is it gave me the ability to have conversations with the team that no other applicant could have. I understood their goals, I understood their jargon, I could make inside jokes.

John Jantsch (05:25.538)

Mm-hmm.

Kyle Austin Young (05:48.56)

There was a group interview where it was me and a bunch of people 20, 30 years older than me with a lot more experience trying to decide who was going to ultimately win the opportunity to lead this department. And one of the books that they read was called The Wuffy Factor. I don’t know if you remember that. was a book about how to, you remember the Wuffy? It was about how brands are in social capital. This was close to 15 years ago. And I remember being in that interview and I said, you know, I think this idea that we’re discussing could help us get a lot of Wuffy.

John Jantsch (05:57.934)

Right.

I remember saying that, yeah, yeah.

Kyle Austin Young (06:11.632)

And I remember looking around and these other applicants, their eyes are bugging out of their heads. What on earth did he just say? You know, is he feeling, okay, what does he mean? We’re going to get a lot of wealthy out of this. But the existing team members, they were all laughing and nodding along. They knew exactly what I was talking about. We were reading the same books. So when all was said and done, I got that job. At 21 years old, I became the product development director for a health organization. It dramatically accelerated my career, but it started with this idea of probability hacking. It started with getting clear on what I wanted and getting clear on what was going to have to go right. Then thinking negatively,

identifying the risks to my success and not resorting to desire as an antidote to uncertainty, but instead using my creativity to solve those problems.

John Jantsch (06:49.006)

So you gave very specific details and steps of what you did, but it sounded, it started to sound a bit like a framework, which I know you have in the book. So were those steps that you gave me a part of that framework? Do you want to outline what that framework is?

Kyle Austin Young (07:04.41)

Sure, I encourage people to start by creating what I call a success diagram. A success diagram is you write down what’s the goal, what do I want to accomplish? I do that at the top right of the page. And then to the left, I just try to list out everything that’s gonna have to go right in order for me to get what I want. So it might be run a marathon. And what I call critical points, the prerequisites to my success are eat according to the regimen my coach gives me, sleep according to the regimen she gives me, train according to the regimen she gives me. So now I have the path, I have the destination.

And then for each one of those things that has to go right, I try to identify the potential bad outcomes. These aren’t just things that could go wrong, they’re alternate outcomes to success. Things that would be so significant they would completely derail the goal if any of them were to come true. After I have those mapped out, I try to just assign a level of risk to each of them. Is this a low risk potential bad outcome, a medium risk, a high risk, so they know how to prioritize? And then probability hacking again is using our creativity to try to find solutions to that. If I’m concerned about

you know, inclement weather derailing my training routine, I might need a treadmill indoors or need to find some alternate exercises that can allow me to build my fitness on days when I can’t go for a run. If I’m concerned about scheduling issues, something happening at my kid’s school, then I might want to train first thing in the morning or I might want to buy an extra pair of running shoes to keep in the car so that I can train at a park if I need to, if my day gets derailed.

John Jantsch (08:20.034)

In a lot of ways, what I’m hearing you describe is, I mean, think there are a lot of people that have mapped out the plan to run the marathon. mean, you can buy books, entire books, will tell you exactly what to do on day one, day two. But what you’re saying a lot of people miss is integrating the whole, you know, of life. And I think in a lot of ways, you’re really just asking people to step back and you’re calling it what could go wrong. But what you’re really doing is saying, hey, you have to have a grasp of reality.

Kyle Austin Young (08:31.29)

Sure.

Kyle Austin Young (08:49.764)

I think you do have to have a grasp of reality. I think that when we consider these statistics that are floating around all the time, just how many people fail at their New Year’s resolutions, how this vast majority of mergers and acquisitions fail to create lasting value for shareholders, how many new businesses will ultimately fail in the first few years after their existence, we start to recognize that it’s because we haven’t stopped to consider the things that could go wrong. And I’ll demonstrate that with just a little bit of numbers. Let’s use that marathon example. There’s three things that have to go right. I need to eat, sleep, and train according to a certain regimen.

John Jantsch (08:51.307)

me

John Jantsch (08:57.139)

Mm-hmm. Right.

John Jantsch (09:13.763)

Mm-hmm.

Kyle Austin Young (09:19.14)

Well, let’s take some imaginary numbers and try to estimate how likely we are to accomplish each of those three things. Maybe we think it’s 70 % across the board. 70 % chance I’ll stick with the diet, 70 % chance I’ll sleep the way I’m supposed to, 70 % chance I’ll train the way I’m supposed to. What a lot of people do is they fall into a trap called averaging. If they feel good about the individual prerequisites, they feel good about the goal as a whole. That’s not actually logically sound, it’s not mathematically sound. What we have to do is multiply those numbers together to find our overall odds of success.

John Jantsch (09:45.261)

Yes.

Kyle Austin Young (09:47.204)

And if we do that, we find that even though we feel really good about each of these things, 70 % across the board, our overall odds of being ready on race day are only 34%. And that I believe explains a lot of the dysfunction in our world. Why are people failing at goals and wondering, how did this not go the way that I expected it to? I felt good about each individual step. Well, you averaged in your head. You didn’t take the time to understand what your overall odds were. And because of that, maybe you didn’t pay as much attention to your opportunity to change your odds as you could have. Maybe you didn’t get that grasp on reality exactly like what you said.

John Jantsch (10:14.926)

Thank

Kyle Austin Young (10:16.27)

and try to the odds in your favor.

John Jantsch (10:18.766)

Is there any, do you ever run the risk or do you find that people might, like if I sat down thought, oh, my odds of actually being prepared on race day is only in the 30 % range, is there any chance that I say, why bother?

Kyle Austin Young (10:32.538)

There could be, but if we’re taking the time to think negative and identify the bad outcomes that are dragging those odds down, then we can use our creativity and see if we can’t change those numbers, at least in how we understand them, to look like something that’s more optimistic. You if we are using our creativity to address the risk of bad weather when we need to train, or address the risk of injury, or address the risk of our schedule being sabotaged, then we can ultimately run the numbers again. And maybe by the time we’re done optimizing this plan,

John Jantsch (10:33.902)

Yeah

Kyle Austin Young (10:59.812)

we end up feeling like it’s 90 % across the board. That’s still not a 90 % chance of success, but I believe it’s in the 70s. It’s a lot better.

John Jantsch (11:05.166)

Yeah. So, so do you find that you have to help people reframe this idea of failure even?

Kyle Austin Young (11:14.426)

Give me an example of what you mean by that.

John Jantsch (11:16.844)

Well, I mean, in some ways you’re, as I listened to you talk about the steps, you’re, you’re, you’re not saying that’s failures of possibility, but that it’s part of the equation. and a lot of people, you know, would have, I think some people would, would struggle with that idea. I, I’m not saying what you’re talking about doesn’t make sense, but just the mindset that a lot of people have that might be hard to overcome.

Kyle Austin Young (11:41.37)

Sure.

Absolutely. Failure is going to be part of the equation. One of the things that I encourage people to consider in the book is the power of multiple attempts. If you’re chasing a goal that’s really unlikely, often one of the most reliable ways to ultimately succeed is to try more than one time. I tell the story of the miracle on ice in the first chapter of the book. I got to interview Jack O’Callaghan who played on that 1980 hockey team that beat the Soviet Union. And a lot of people consider that a miracle. It’s been called the greatest sporting event of the 20th century, I believe, by Sports Illustrated.

John Jantsch (11:57.518)

Right.

Kyle Austin Young (12:14.028)

And as an individual event, it was really miraculous. But when you recognize that over the course of this Olympic rivalry, the United States played the Soviets nine times and won two, that’s not that remarkable. Winning two times out of nine isn’t unheard of. So was it surprising that they won the game they won? Sure. But the odds told us that we would expect them to win some games. And that’s ultimately what they did. And what’s interesting is when I interviewed Jack, he told me that in the locker room before they went out to take the ice for that game,

John Jantsch (12:23.842)

Mm-hmm. Right.

John Jantsch (12:35.18)

Yeah.

Kyle Austin Young (12:42.244)

Coach Herb Brooks gives this speech and there’s a movie about it and the movie has some quotes that are really powerful. What Jack told me is he said he doesn’t remember the exact words that were spoken. But he says he remembers that when he left the locker room, they’re trudging down to take the ice. He says he remembers leaving with the idea that his coach believed if we played them 10 times, they might beat us nine times, but they’re not going to beat us tonight. And so there was an expectation that failure was going to be a part of that, but they had an opportunity for tonight to be the exception. And ultimately it was.

John Jantsch (13:10.446)

I remember vividly watching that in my dorm room in college. does this, like a marathon I would call a long-term goal, particularly for somebody who hasn’t run one, right? They should start early, right? Can this be applied to short-term decisions as well?

Kyle Austin Young (13:14.956)

Amazing. I missed it by a few years, but I’m jealous.

Kyle Austin Young (13:24.666)

Sure. Sure.

Kyle Austin Young (13:33.166)

absolutely. You know, in the context of me trying to get that job, I just did this as I headed into an interview. It was going to all take place in a day. When we have something that needs to go right, one of the best things we can do to help it go right is think about what could go wrong. Ultimately, that’s what’s dragging our probability down. If you think about flipping a coin, let’s say you need it to land on heads, you have a 50 % chance of success. Why? Why don’t you have a 100 % chance of success? Well, because it might land on tails, and there’s a 50 % chance of that happening. Now, I don’t know how to rig a coin to make it…

do what I want it to do. But in life, a lot of times we can rig it or we can re-rig it in our favor. We can try to take the risk out of the bad outcomes, bring those odds over to our side.

John Jantsch (14:11.448)

So if somebody hasn’t thought this way, what’s kind some of the first things you try to help people? And again, I don’t know if you actually consult on this or teach courses on this as well, but what are some of the first things you try to do to get people to start putting this way of thinking? Because I think a lot of times these things are just mindset. So what do you get them to start thinking this way? What are some of the first things?

Kyle Austin Young (14:32.784)

Well, in the book, I tell people that I think there are four paths to success. One of them is some people just get lucky. I tell the story of Norma Jean Doherty. She’s working at an aviation munitions factory in the war, and a photographer comes to take pictures for a military magazine to inspire the troops. He notices Norma Jean, thinks she’s really beautiful, says, can I take some pictures for you for magazines that don’t have anything to do with the military? And she said, sure. She ultimately finds a lot of success as a model and then goes on to star as an actress under the name Marilyn Monroe, has just this enormously successful career.

That is certainly a success story. Is it a success story we should reverse engineer though? If I meet a young woman who’s coming to me for training or coaching rather, can you tell me what I can do to become a successful Hollywood star? Would I say, well, the first thing you need to do is get a job at an aviation munitions factory and hope that someday a military photographer stops by and notices how pretty you are and says, can I take some pictures of you? No, that probably wouldn’t be a very reliable path to success. So some people succeed through luck. They succeed even though the odds are bad, simply because we expect unlikely events to happen sometimes.

Some people succeed, they don’t beat the odds, but they play them. We think about entrepreneurs, there are some really famous examples of people who heard that nine out of 10 businesses fail, and that was actually what inspired them to start 10 businesses or 15 businesses, was the belief that they were going to experience those predicted failures, but they would also experience the predicted successes. Some people succeed because they have advantages, they have areas of tremendous strength in their lives, and so they try to lean into those goals.

John Jantsch (15:41.314)

you

Kyle Austin Young (15:54.084)

That can often be something that’s really wise for us is asking the question, what are some goals that are pretty high probability goals for me right now that might bring bigger accomplishments within reach? One of the goals that I had for years was ultimately getting a book deal and hopefully getting a big advance and being able to publish that to a mass audience with a major publisher. At the time when I set that goal, it wasn’t really realistic for me, but I was able to pursue smaller goals that changed my odds. One of them was writing for major publications.

John Jantsch (16:01.42)

Mm-hmm.

Kyle Austin Young (16:21.04)

As you mentioned, I’ve written for sites like HBR, Fast Company, Psychology Today. But one of my favorite things and one of the reasons I was so excited to have the opportunity to come on is it’s an exciting full circle moment for me. When I first decided that I was going to try to write for some of these respected publications, get my voice out there and ultimately position myself for things like a book deal, the first site that took me was the Duct Tape Marketing Blog. It was in 2015. I remember I was in my grandmother’s house at the time. They were having a garage sale. I was helping out when I got the response. I couldn’t even tell you where I was sitting.

John Jantsch (16:31.63)

You

John Jantsch (16:42.292)

the

Kyle Austin Young (16:49.742)

and it was such an exciting thing. So it’s an honor to be with you here today. So that’s the third path of success is people making the most of areas where they have good odds. The fourth path is probability hacking, doing everything you can to tilt the odds in your favor.

John Jantsch (16:50.286)

you

John Jantsch (17:01.006)

So, you know, I was going to ask you about resilience. And then you kind of threw in that story about the entrepreneurs starting 10 businesses, but what, what connection do you think with the framework and just the whole mindset of resilience? What does it play?

Kyle Austin Young (17:17.774)

Well, it’s incredibly important if you’re going to especially be pursuing the path of repeated attempts. In the book, I tell the story of Thomas Edison. He’s in a race to try to get valuable patents surrounding the incandescent lamp. If he can get them, it’ll be something that’s transformational for his career. And what this race came down to is he and these other people were all trying to find a practical filament. They needed something that could glow hot enough to emit light without catching on fire and without snuffing out really quickly to the point where it wasn’t worth it. What Edison did that was different than these other people…

John Jantsch (17:23.0)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:29.709)

Mm-hmm.

Kyle Austin Young (17:47.376)

is he actually experimented with 6,000 different plant materials to find the one that worked best. He didn’t try to divine the right answer. He didn’t try to guess the right answer. The answer turned out to be, in his context, carbonized bamboo. And I don’t know about you. That would not have been my first guess. If you said, what are we going to use as a filament? I would have said, I bet it’s carbonized bamboo. That’s not where I would have started. It’s not where he started either. It took 6,000 attempts. But ultimately, he had a clear definition of success. He had a stopwatch, so to speak. And he was able to run more experiments than anyone else. And because of that,

John Jantsch (17:54.144)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (18:04.718)

the

Kyle Austin Young (18:15.364)

he found these unlikely answers. so resilience is a big part of that. Some of it comes from, we need to be confident that there is going to be a best answer out there. And in his case, it wasn’t, you know, it was comparative. He could be confident that one option out of the 6,000 would be the best out of the 6,000. And he liked his chance of creating a great product with a wider net when it came to ultimately trying to find the best filament than he did with somebody who’s only trying two or three things.

John Jantsch (18:27.982)

Thanks.

John Jantsch (18:41.526)

Yeah, and there’s obviously, I don’t know that it’s all true, but you hear these stories that people would ask him, gosh, aren’t you tired of failing so much? He said, no, I just have one more thing out of the way that I know is not the answer.

Kyle Austin Young (18:55.116)

He has a quote attributed to him that’s, to have a great idea, have a lot of them. And I think it’s that exact same mentality. It’s not about being the smartest person in the room necessarily. A lot of times it’s being the most generative. It’s being the person who’s the most prolific and who ultimately uncovers that unlikely good idea.

John Jantsch (18:58.936)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:12.396)

Yeah. And, and, you know, there’s, there’s certainly a mentality out there. People want to, you know, take the easy path, get rich quick, you know, be famous, all the things that, people aspire to. And I don’t, you know, the, people that really get there, you know, they just show up and do the work every day for a long time. Sometimes.

Kyle Austin Young (19:29.614)

Well, it’s one of the dangers of reverse engineering, like I mentioned, you know, the Marilyn Monroe story, we kind of chuckle at that, but I think we’re doing similar things in our daily lives. We’ll find somebody who started a successful organization and turns out he drives a blue convertible. So I should buy a blue convertible because clearly that’s got to be playing a role in his success. What if he just got lucky? I’m not saying that they did, but we need to be really careful about what we reverse engineer because just because someone is seeing good results doesn’t mean that they got there through good decisions.

John Jantsch (19:31.874)

Yeah, yeah.

Right? Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:46.924)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:54.646)

Yeah. Well, and I think a lot of times we miss the 10 years before, before they blew up, right? Yeah, exactly. Well, Kyle, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there someplace you’d invite people to find out more about your work and to perhaps pick up success is a numbers game.

Kyle Austin Young (19:58.778)

Sure, yeah, that kind of quote that most overnight successes are 20 years in the making, sure.

Kyle Austin Young (20:14.0)

You can get a copy of the book pretty much anywhere, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, directly on the Penguin Random House website. Be honored if you did that. If you want to connect with me personally, I think we’ll probably put my website in the show notes, just kyleaustinyoung.com. But what I’d prefer you do, honestly, this was something that was just kind of an unexpected blessing of this journey, is I heard someone who was encouraging people to find them on LinkedIn, and I thought, that’s a strange thing to do. I’ll throw that idea out too. And that was many interviews ago, but it’s turned into one of just the best parts of this, is pretty much every day I wake up and someone has

John Jantsch (20:25.134)

Mm-hmm.

Kyle Austin Young (20:43.118)

sent me a message saying, I heard you here, I heard you there, can I ask you a question? It’s led to some really engaging conversations that I’ve really enjoyed, some fun opportunities for collaboration for me. So feel free to find me, Kyle Austin Young on LinkedIn. I’d love to hear from you.

John Jantsch (20:45.1)

Okay.

John Jantsch (20:56.618)

Awesome. Well, again, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll maybe we’ll run into one of these days out there on the road.

Kyle Austin Young (21:02.16)

That’d be great. Thanks.