We’re back again for another Sunday Story in our “Bluey” series, where we go over the best leadership lessons learned from the hit Australian TV show. In this story, we’re going to focus on Season 1, Episode 11: Bike.
Most of us remember learning to ride a bike for the first time. Some of us had training wheels, others a balance bike, but those of us lucky enough to have this experience (which is a lot of us) probably remember it being really scary and hard but then being a great sense of accomplishment in our young lives.
This episode starts on that familiar experience - Bluey trying to learn to ride her bike, and not having much success. She quickly declares that “It’s not fair. Why can’t I just do it straight away?”. Her dad explains “That’s just now how the world works, kid”, and the response is something I’m sure we’ve all felt from time to time:
“Then the world is silly”.
Bluey, in a fit of frustration, gives up and declares she’s never going to try to ride her bike again. She grabs a seat next to her dad on the bench and they start people watching. That’s when she notices her sister Bingo, struggling to get water from the fountain - the timer on the water flow expires before she can climb the fountain high enough to get a drink. Her other friend Bentley is trying to learn to do the monkey bars, but cannot reach them to get started. And her cousin Muffin has just finished drinking water and putting it in her backpack, but the backpack proves too heavy and awkward for Muffin to put on.
Bluey then notices that despite the setback, Bingo is trying again. She gets so close to getting some water - but not quite, and she falls on the ground. Bentley gets a run at the monkey bars, but gets nothing but air and lands on the ground. And Muffin starts spinning trying to get her arm through her backpack strap, but with no success and falls over dizzy.
Bingo, Bentley, and Muffin are all discouraged - “Why can’t I do it straight away?” cries Bentley as she once again misses the bars. “I’ll never drink water again” wails Bingo after another failed attempt at the water fountain. Bluey, seeing her sister sad, says she’s going to go help - but her dad tells her to wait and see what happens next.
All three kids wipe their tears, brush themselves off, and try again. Muffin figures out that lying on her back can help her get the backpack on, Bentley realizes that by climbing the pole next to the monkey bars she can reach it. Bingo’s solution is less elegant, but equally effective - she floods the water fountain until it creates a puddle on the ground that she can reach and laps the water from the puddle. “Less than ideal” her dad Bandit says “But still a win”. After watching all this, Bluey grabs her helmet, sits astride her bicycle once again, and gives it another shot.
The episode’s relevance to leadership should be obvious, but to sum it up I’ll borrow a quote from another TV show called “Adventure Time” - “Sucking at something is the first step to being sort of good at something”. Nobody is good at something the first time they try - that’s true for leadership in general, but it’s also true for those new growing edges that you find every day. I challenge the person reading this to think back to the times they’ve sucked at something.
Some of you will remember when your organization first adopted Outlook for e-mail. It sucked to send those first few e-mails didn’t it? Or to arrange those calendar invites? And then once you were feeling sort-of comfortable, the system updated and all your stuff was in a new place. Repeat that story every few years for the last few decades, right? Much like Bluey falling off the bike, you probably felt pretty frustrated when your systems change and you weren't able to get things straight away. But you got back on your metaphorical bike, and now you’re reading this either in your inbox (Yes, you can get Sunday Stories delivered directly via e-mail!) or on our website. You’ve gone from not really understanding how all this software works, to using computers as a fundamental part of your work. Replace “email” with “Smartphone”, “Customer Management System”, “New procedures”, or any other learning curve you’ve had to scramble up in your career. You probably sucked at it to begin with, but then you got better. And if you didn’t suck at it, it’s probably because you sucked at something else that was similar, and that gave you a leg-up when the new thing came along.
The point is, it doesn’t matter how simple or complex a thing is - when you do it for the first time, it’s going to be hard. But whether your task is riding a bike, swinging from monkey bars, or getting a sip of water, this episode of Bluey gives us a few critical leadership lessons that are easy to forget in our hyper-competitive systems.
First, this episode highlights the importance of understanding taste/talent gap that was first introduced by Ira Glass. Glass was referring to creative work, but I think leadership is fundamentally a creative process (good leadership creates good leadership) and so the lens applies here too. Every creator gets into creating things because they have a particular passion or taste for it - that’s usually quite refined and good good. This “taste” is that instinctual or intuitive knowledge that you have where “this isn’t right and can be better” or “this is how things should be”. Your talent, on the other hand, is your ability to bring things to life and create. The trouble is, creation is a skill - Da Vinci didn’t start out by painting the Mona Lisa the moment a brush hit his hand. Often, when a person is first doing something new, they know what it should be like because of their taste. But they lack the talent - the actual skill - to get it to be at that standard. Many folks get frustrated in this gap; they don’t want to put the time into building the skills necessary to create something that matches their tastes. They don’t hold the learning mindset tightly enough, and they get frustrated and give up.
This is devastating for creatives of all sorts, but especially so with Leaders who are often (wrongly) expected to have the right answers all the time. We don’t - nobody does. But, if we don’t hold this learning mindset, the pressure we feel to have the right answer or solutions all the time create an untenable situation for us; it creates a fear of failure that can be very hard to overcome and can paralyze folks into inaction.
Alternatively, if you engage in your leadership expecting to “suck” in order to be “sorta good” eventually, you’ll give yourself permission to practice instead of expectations of immediate performance or perfection. Give yourself grace to learn.
The second important lesson here is that growth and learning is hard. Bluey gets frustrated and gives up on riding bikes. Bingo decides that drinking water is just a thing that is never going to happen again. Bentley, in tears, accepts they’ll never be a Monkey Bar hero like the bigger kids. And Muffin -well, Muffin declares that “This situation is entirely unacceptable”, so her feelings are clear on the matter.
But after wiping away the tears, all of them shake it off and try again.
Frustration is a normal part of the leadership experience and it’s not one we talk about often enough. If we get frustrated as a leader, we often fear it will be seen as a failure in your leadership. After all, a good leader would have the solution and not get frustrated, right?
Nah, that’s not true, and Bluey shows us why. Getting frustrated is a normal part of learning. In fact, some argue that frustration is actually fundamental to human creativity, and I’m sure you can think of experiences you have had where that’s been proven. Have you ever gotten so frustrated at a task or a project that you had to set it down and walk away? Of course you have. And what happened when you came back to it a few hours, days, or weeks later?
If you were like Bentley on the Monkey Bars, you would have gotten frustrated, and given up. But once those feelings of frustration pass, Bentley was looking at the problem a little differently, and found a different solution that she didn’t previously notice. That’s what often happens with frustration - it forces us to take a step back, and when we return to address the problem, our perspective has likely shifted. We’ve learned, we’ve grown, and we’re ready to try something different, and the solution often comes to us in a way that feels shockingly easy compared to the frustration we initially experienced.
The trick is - feeling frustrated is normal and healthy. How you spot and respond to those feelings is incredibly important - some folks lash out in anger, and that’s not a good leadership tactic no matter what your context. Others go for a walk, take some deep breaths, or take a break from the project until they feel calmer - that’s a better way to react. Remember, it’s always OK to feel frustrated - but as a leader, it’s rarely OK to act frustrated towards or around others.
Leadership can be an incredibly rewarding calling, but never forget that it’s going to be full of things you need to do, and in many cases you’ll be doing those things for the first time. You should expect to suck at things you try for the first time - that’s a good thing! Because sucking at something is the first step to becoming sorta good at something. The process of becoming sorta good - just like the process of riding a bike or getting a drink from a fountain - can be super frustrating. But frustration is a normal and healthy part of growth - what matters is how you respond to that frustration.
That brings us to the end of the lessons learned from this episode, but there’s a few more in this series. What will Bluey and the Heeler family teach us next week? Stay tuned - we’ll see you next Sunday.
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