On this episode of Level to Power, we’re joined by professional wrestler, management consultant, landlord, insurance broker, proud father, and “sexual being” Aaron Fenzi, otherwise known in the ring as “Mr. Thursday Night”. We discuss the hidden power dynamics within the world of professional wrestling, and how you can use the showmanship and camaraderie of the sport to inspire success within your own professional industry.
Apex Level To Power is a podcast that examines the inner workings of human interactions and teaches you how to succeed within your own interpersonal relationships. Change your level, change your life, change the world.
Episode Highlights:
- An Introduction to Aaron Fenzi
- Human power dynamics in professional wrestling
- Being a team player vs standing out
- Working a crowd
- The difference between workers and wrestlers – moving up in your industry
- Gaining and giving credibility & establishing trust
- Finding your moment
Resources:
- Aaron Fenzi’s health and life insurance agency, The Tan Agency
- Scott Adams’ blog post on Donald Trump’s methods of manipulation
Visit Level To Power for episode archives and transcripts
Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and post a review to empower the podcast
Quotes/Tweets:
“I consider a pro-wrestling locker room to be comparable to a girl’s locker room in a high schools. There’s so much gossip and cat-fighting it’s ridiculous” – Aaron Fenzi
“Wrestling is a soap opera for men”- Aaron Fenzi
“You can’t go out in the first match and have Hulk Hogan vs Andre the Giant. Know your place” – Aaron Fenzi
“The crowd is fickle. But a master can always work the crowd” – Mark Gleason
“Throwing one of us under the bus makes all of us look bad” – Mark Gleason
Transcript
| Mark Gleason: | Welcome to APEX Level To Power the podcast completely dedicated to your self-empowerment. In this episode we try a look at human power dynamics from a brand new angle. We have a man of many talents, Aaron Fenzi, on the program, and Aaron has an interesting perspective on human power dynamics because in addition to being and working as a consultant in corporate America he also for many years has been a professional wrestler, and he gives us some interesting insights into some of the common themes of human power dynamics in many different areas of our life. I hope you enjoy the interview. I know I did. I give you Aaron Fenzi, otherwise known as Mister Thursday Night. You change your level. You change your life. You can change the world. Welcome to APEX Level To Power.
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| Escape the herd. Rise above the pack. This is the APEX Level To Power podcast, the only place on the web that teaches you to identify and control the invisible strings that dominate all human interaction. We teach sheep to become wolves, a challenge to be sure, but one that we answer and answer with vigor. I am your faithful host Mark Gleason. I welcome you to the program, and I invite you to visit our little corner of the web at leveltopower.com for more information and to support the broadcast.
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| Speaker 2: | Now, for an episode from the APEX Level To Power Man on Fire Series. Build a man a fire, keep him warn for a day. Set a man on fire, and keep him warm for the rest of his life.
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| Mark Gleason: | I’m very pleased to have today Aaron Fenzi otherwise known as Mister Thursday Night. He is an entrepreneur, a landlord, a professional wrestler, and many other things that I really can’t name.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | A true Renaissance man on a Saturday night, but as you know every night is Thursday …
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| Mark Gleason: | Every night is Thursday …
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| Aaron Fenzi: | … with Mister Thursday Night.
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| Mark Gleason: | … when Mister Thursday Night is here. Aaron Fenzi, I welcome you to the program. We are very, very pleased to have you. Would you be so kind as to give my listeners an introduction to yourself, who you are, what you’re about, and we would love to hear more about you and some of your ideas.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | You’ve basically given the intro but I’ll expand upon a few things. Yes, I been in the management consulting business thanks to you for the past, what, almost 10 years. I co-own an insurance brokerage called The TAN Agency, also for the past five or so years. Pro wrestler off and on throughout the course of the past 26 years, although probably I would say seven years, eight years actual in ring time. The list goes on and on. Proud father. Sexual being. The whole kit and caboodle. Perhaps the latter led to the former. You know?
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| Mark Gleason: | All of that and a bag of gluten free chips.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | And a bag of kale chips.
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| Mark Gleason: | One thing that we know about you is that you are Mister Thursday Night, professional wrestler.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Correct.
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| Mark Gleason: | Would you mind pulling back the curtain a bit …
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Not at all.
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| Mark Gleason: | … on the human power dynamics that occur behind the scenes and what goes into making a really enjoyable wrestling match?
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| Aaron Fenzi: | I will tell you whatever you want to know about the pro wrestling industry. I consider a pro wrestling locker room to be comparable to a girl’s locker room in a high school. There’s so much gossip and back biting and in-fighting, and cat fighting. It’s just ridiculous.
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| Mark Gleason: | Do people steal each other’s hair brushes?
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| Aaron Fenzi: | No. People sometimes crap in each other’s bags and I once heard a story where a guy peed in somebody’s water bottle. I’m not joking. I’m not joking. I don’t believe in hazing like that. I think that’s terrible. I don’t agree with that at all. Come in, do your job, and leave, and to me that’s it, but there’s so many times there’s power struggles. You’ll see guys whom you know are not going to last much longer due to the length of their careers or let’s say somebody is just coming up, so the older guys get a little jealous of the young guys, but then the young guys don’t really know how to wrestle all that well anyway.
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| Mark Gleason: | To clear up for everybody, this is professional wrestling. This is the ring where the fight, “fight.”
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| Aaron Fenzi: | It’s fake.
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| Mark Gleason: | It’s actually faked up front.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Yeah. It’s fake.
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| Mark Gleason: | The stunts are worked out. It’s all about the show. It’s all about the drama that’s created on stage.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | It’s a soap opera for men.
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| Mark Gleason: | It’s a big soap opera for women and men who like women things.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Yes. Anybody can get mad being in wrestling because we basically get paid to run around in our underwear, and that’s basically the gist of the whole thing. We get to run around in our underwear and have people cheer for us or boo us. I get booed mostly because I play a heel character. A heel is a bad guy. A baby face is a good guy. Oftentimes you’ll see struggles even when putting together a match. Usually the guy who has more experience puts together the match, or calls the match, and you can either call it in the back or you can call it in the ring. I prefer to call it in the ring because I know how to improv and I like to gauge what I do based on a crowd reaction.
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| Mark Gleason: | Okay, so in the APEX Level To Power there’s three levels. Level one is you’re locked in your own paradigm, your own way of seeing the world and that’s it. What you perceive is true. Level two is I can see my way of seeing the world and also I can kind of see how other people are also perceiving what’s going on. Then level three is I can stand in many different places at once and I can kind of weave it all together into a tapestry. Level one, level two, so a level one wrestler in my mind would be somebody who goes out there. They have their agenda. They’re doing it. They have a very hard time trying to see through the audiences’ eyes how this is being perceived, therefore regardless of the reaction they’re going through their prescribed whatever, and at the time they’re done they think they did a great job.
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| Whereas a level two in a wrestling context is going to be able to say, “I see my perception. I see the perception of the crowd over there. I see the perception of the crowd over there. They’re having a good time. They’re not. Maybe it’s because we’re spending too much time on this side of the ring,” and able to piece together to create a good experience for everybody. I would assume that you have a lot of these self-interested, prima donna types. That’s my perception.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | You know what? I’m glad you brought that up because … There’s many different facets of the level one and the level two, because not only do you have to take the audience into consideration, you have to take the other wrestlers, not just the guy in the ring with you, because your job in the ring is to make the other guy look good, and his job is to make you look good. It’s a very symbiotic relationship. If you’re the first match on the show and you go out there and you have this idea, “Oh, I’m going to steal the show and I’m going to do all of this stuff, and the audience is going to cheer. This is awesome. This is awesome. We’re going to get out and we’re going to hit each other with chairs and we’re going to get color.”
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| What that means is you blade yourself, let’s say, in the forehead, and you produce blood. That’s actually frowned upon in the big leagues. In WWE they have a no blood policy because they’re a PG company, so they want to get as many advertisers as possible and I agree with the no blood thing, because there was a guy, an old guy named Abdullah the Butcher whose real name is Larry. I forget where he’s supposed to be from, but he’s a very soft spoken guy. He owns a restaurant down in Atlanta. He has hepatitis C. There was a guy who wrestled him on an indie show and probably got 50 bucks to wrestle Abdullah the Butcher, and Abby cut him, he cut his forehead open and then got hep C.
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| The guy sued him. He wouldn’t consent to a blood test. I wonder why he wouldn’t consent to that blood test, because he has hep C. A lot of guys do. A lot of those guys do, and for whatever reason, but I don’t cut myself. I’ve told guys a million and one times. I said, “If you hit me with a chair I’m going to take that chair away from you and beat you with it for real.” I’m not going to make it safe. Because guys used to get unprotected chair shots to the head. That’s why that guy Chris Benoit went crazy. It wasn’t steroids. I mean it had to do with the alcohol he was drinking. He was on painkillers like you wouldn’t believe, and he took a ton of chair shots to the head in an effort to make it look real.
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| Mark Gleason: | I don’t know the story. What happened to him?
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Chris Benoit was the wrestler who killed his wife, his son, and then himself. This was almost 10 years ago.
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| Mark Gleason: | Okay. That does ring a bell.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Anyway, getting back to the level ones and level twos, so those guys who go into business for themselves as we call it. They want to make themselves look great and all of this nonsense and they want to get the cheers and adulation from the fans and blah blah blah blah. A wrestling show is as follows: every match has to lead up to the main event. It’s all part of a story. Let’s say, for example, in Star Wars would Darth Vader ultimately say, “Screw this. I’m going to win. I’m going to make myself look amazing”? No.
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| Mark Gleason: | In the first five minutes.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Yeah. Exactly. I’m killing everybody. No. You wouldn’t do that. You would go according to the script. Same with wrestling, I mean technically we don’t have a script. We know who is going to win and who is going to lose, but we can control our matches.
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| Mark Gleason: | Is it fair to say then that there’s at least three, I’m just going to lay out three for you here.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Go ahead.
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| Mark Gleason: | There’s one arc here which is the match I’m participating in as a wrestler. I want to look good. You want to look good, and we want both of us to look good for the crowd. There is the second arc which is the event. I have to know my place in the event. Am I the first match? Am I the match leading up to the main event? Am I the main event? Then there’s a third meta-game which is the larger story with the fans, the larger story with my co-wrestlers, so if I take some cheap shots in one match I might win and get some adulation temporarily, but other wrestlers who see that I’m cashing in on somebody else’s expense can say, “Oh, I don’t want to work with that guy anymore.” You have at least three different levels of perception that are required.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Absolutely.
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| Mark Gleason: | You get these guys who come in who are young bucks, they see one level of the game which is, “I want to look good now,” and they’re missing the meta-game.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | That’s right. The meta-game is the most important thing. There was a wrestler named Playboy Buddy Rose who was one of the smartest guys in the business. He passed away years ago, but he used to have a blog.
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| Mark Gleason: | Did he pass away from a chair shot?
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| Aaron Fenzi: | He did. No. He had diabetes. He was a very large guy. He was about 400 pounds, but he was as athletic as a 200 pound guy, so never judge a book by its cover. This guy was something else. Again, a very, very intelligent man, and people asked if somebody were to stiff you in the ring, what that means is when somebody stiffs you that means somebody hits you for real.
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| Mark Gleason: | For real. I bounce off the ropes, you’d supposed to clothesline me, but you’re going for “authenticity” and you really clothesline me and I bounce my head off the canvas.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | You could get a snug clothesline. What that means is a tight clothesline where it looks like I’m going to take your head off, but I mean it’ll hurt a little bit but it won’t really hurt you. What I mean is somebody punches you in the face with what we call a potato. There are wrestlers who “fire potatoes” at you the whole match, and the only way to stop that is to hit the person back. Then they ultimately knock it off.
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| Mark Gleason: | Actually the only way to stop that is to duck your head and have them break their hand on your forehead.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | There you go. There you go.
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| Mark Gleason: | Whoops.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to mangle your fingers.
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| Mark Gleason: | Hate when that happens.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Yeah. This guy Playboy Buddy Rose said the greatest thing. He said, “Stiffing in wrestling doesn’t work because if you hurt somebody you put that person out of action and that person can’t make money. That person can’t put food on the table. What it does to you is you’ll get a reputation as being an unsafe worker, and nobody is going to want to work with you, so you’re hurting yourself.”
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| Mark Gleason: | Absolutely, and that’s the long game. I mean look in the UFC which I’m more of a fan of where the fighting …
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| Aaron Fenzi: | I still love the UFC as well.
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| Mark Gleason: | … and the action is real, but if you’re a person who is going after people’s knees, or, for instance, if you do a knee bar which can take a fighter out for years if you wrench their knee, and by all means win, and by all means win the best way you can within the rules, but there are fighters who the person taps, or the ref comes and says, “Stop.” They give it this final crank just to hurt the other guy. Those people have a very bad reputation. There was one guy who was a really talented jujitsu guy. I think they banned him from the UFC. I’m not sure if they did or not, but he had a fight where it was a bit egregious, and the funny thing is the guy was a very mild mannered guy. He’s exactly not the guy you would think would do that.
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| He was a jujitsu guy, he was in it, he was cranking the knee. They guy tapped. The ref told him to stop, and he gave it this final twist and then stood up, like the exclamation point. Look, it’s one thing when you give an exclamation point by using the guy to help you stand up because you’re … You put your hand on his body and you step up. Some guys will step on the guy as they’re walking away which is also very, very bad manners. It doesn’t happen very often, but that is all just being silly. Taking a guy’s knee out when he puts food on his table because he’s a fighter like you is egregious, and all the other fighters look at that and say, “I’m not fighting that guy. Why would I risk my career with some guy who is, he’s reckless enough where he may damage my ability to earn?” That’s the meta-game that these guys are missing.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Again, the second level you talked about was understanding your place on the card. So important. You can’t go out in the opening match and have Hulk Hogan versus Andre the Giant. That will never happen.
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| Mark Gleason: | Nowadays you could because that would be a great intro to all the big stars of today, particularly if they got Andre the Giant back …
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| Aaron Fenzi: | From the dead.
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| Mark Gleason: | … and had Hulk Hogan dance with him around the ring. I would pay to see … I’m not even a wrestling fan.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | I call that, I-
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| Mark Gleason: | I would download that pay-per-view no matter the cost.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | I use that as an example because at one time that was the biggest match in history, Hulk Hogan versus Andre the Giant. Put ninety-three thousand people in the Pontiac Silverdome in 1987. That’s a lot of paying customers to see Hulk Hogan do one move the entire match. He did a body slam. The match was 12 minutes long of course, but he did one move, did a body slam.
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| Mark Gleason: | That’s like my honeymoon all over again.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Yeah. Exactly. Multiply that by 12 and you have …
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| Mark Gleason: | My honeymoon.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | I should say divide it by 12 and then you have mine. There was a match beforehand. I don’t know if you remember a guy named Randy “Macho Man” Savage.
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| Mark Gleason: | Yes. I do.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Of course. Oh Yeah. He wrestled a guy named Ricky Steamboat. Both very athletic guys, very charismatic, workers. They said let’s go out and steal the show. For whatever reason they went out and they put on a 20 minute wrestling classic. A lot of moves. A lot of false finishes, that’s where you get a one-two count. I think there were about 18 false finishes in the match. Very exciting. Crowd ate it up, blah blah blah blah. I would have been furious if I were Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant because that is not the match everybody paid to see. The match that everybody paid to see was Hulk Hogan versus Andre the Giant. That is why it was the last match on the show. I feel like …
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| Mark Gleason: | Where’s that line between being a good soldier, which we all can agree that you need the overall meta-game to move forward, but sometimes it’s not fun being a pawn, and …
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| Aaron Fenzi: | No. You’re right.
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| Mark Gleason: | … even though the script calls for you to fall on your sword, when do you fall on your sword and how do you move forward yourself in the meta-game?
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| Aaron Fenzi: | This was an interesting question.
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| Mark Gleason: | By the way, people face this in every, in corporate life, in their personal life. When are you a team player for the tribe and when do you choose that moment to stand out, because that one moment if you choose to stand out and it’s the wrong moment, the hammer will fall on you like swift justice.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | That sword that you should have fallen on, it will cut off your head.
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| Mark Gleason: | That’s correct.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Right. I’ll get back to the corporate world in a second, but I can tell you the wrestling part of it where Savage and Steamboat had their match, Randy Savage was a stickler for perfection in his matches, so he actually wrote out the entire script of the match beforehand.
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| Mark Gleason: | Did he use diagrams as well?
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| Aaron Fenzi: | He did not.
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| Mark Gleason: | I would insist upon diagrams.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | He had a notebook that he gave to Steamboat. Actually they might have been typed out. I mean this is what a nut Macho Man was. Had a ring at his house down in Florida. Had Steamboat come and stay with him. I think there were a 100 something, maybe a 180 moves during the match.
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| Mark Gleason: | If you’re a professional I would think that’s what you would need to do. You would need to have a ring at your house. You would want to, to put on the best possible show and leave nothing to chance obviously you need to practice, right?
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| Aaron Fenzi: | I’ll give you-
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| Mark Gleason: | Unless you’re a Jazz great, at which point you do the exact opposite of what I just said.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | That’s absolutely true. You remember another guy, George “The Animal” Steele?
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| Mark Gleason: | I do. I met him once.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | George “The Animal” Steele is one of the greatest guys ever in wrestling. He and I have diametrically opposed opinion. He’s a very religious man. I’m an atheist. Be that as it may I had a wonderful breakfast with him one day and we talked about wrestling, and we talked about-
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| Mark Gleason: | This sounds very sweet.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | It was very sweet.
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| Mark Gleason: | It sounds sweet.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | You know like my dinner with Andre?
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| Mark Gleason: | Yeah.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | This was my breakfast with Animal.
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| Mark Gleason: | The way you tell it, I mean our listeners can’t see you but you do …
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Glowing. I’m glowing.
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| Mark Gleason: | You have a glisten in your eye right now.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Yes I do. No, because he was one of several celebrities who have paid for my breakfast so that was always nice. George and I, we talked about a lot of wrestling psychology and a lot of things behind the scenes in the business that nobody would ever think about, but he was telling us about how when he was in a program with Macho Man, I think it was a six month program, which he said did so much great business it funded his retirement, because he was about 50-something at the time. Macho came in the first time they ever worked together with a five page script of what they should do in their matches. You have to understand when a younger guy comes up to a veteran, which George Steele is one of the greatest vets you can imagine, has one of the sharpest minds for the business, it’s kind of disrespectful.
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| George was such a good guy he didn’t get outwardly upset. Instead what he did was he took the pages, he tore one in half. He tore the second, third, fourth, and fifth in half, so Macho went nuts. He said, “I spent a lot of time doing this, blah blah blah blah.” George said, “Just follow my lead out there. We are going to have a great match because what works in Detroit might not work in Cleveland. The whole different story.” They did. Called everything in the ring. George called everything in the ring. That man is a pro, an absolute professional. They say an expert is somebody who has had ten thousand hours doing a particular activity. George Steele is an expert at wrestling.
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| There’s another guy who does very little in the ring because he doesn’t have to. He gets over with the crowd, what they call getting over; it’s getting acceptance from the crowd, based on his character. His character is what got him all the recognition, not his moves. Moves are secondary. I always say that in wrestling. Moves are secondary.
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| Mark Gleason: | That’s what’s so interesting about this. It’s the mob psychology. It is the tapping into the mood of the crowd, the tribe at its most primal level. This is what politicians strive for. This is what corporate leaders strive for. It is riding the roller coaster of emotion that is the crowd to win them to your side, to win them to your cause because the crowd is fickle, but a master can always work the crowd, and you see it even with stand up comics, and you see it with politicians. Any good performer has that sense of the pulse of the crowd and can manipulate the herd to a great height or great lows, and both of them, it is the swings apparently that give them the power, because the great excitement and the great depression, back up to the excitement, those swings are kind of what give the crowd momentum and as a performer you try to harness that and win them to your side.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | I always say there’s a difference between a wrestler and a worker. A wrestler is the guy who does the moves. A worker is somebody who works the crowd, plays on their emotions and gets them to go along with whatever you’re doing. Take a look at politics right now. Who is one of the two most famous people in politics right now? I should say three, because you have the president and the two presidential candidates. The one I’m talking about is-
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| Mark Gleason: | Donald Trump.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Donald Trump is one of the finest workers I have ever seen in politics. I have rarely seen somebody who is this talented as a worker. Whether you agree with his politics or not it’s a completely different story, but he is working his audience to the point where I have never seen anybody go along with it like this.
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| Mark Gleason: | The author of Dilbert, I think it’s Scott Adams.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Scott Adams. That’s right.
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| Mark Gleason: | He’s on record four months ago or so saying, “I think Trump is going to win and this is why.” Scott Adams is interestingly a registered hypnotist, so he is skilled in the art of hypnotism and mind control. He’s studied a lot of it. He said that, “Trump’s mannerisms, his use of hyperbole and bombast, and his fourth grade level language that everybody can understand very, very clearly.” He made a list of the top ten things you need to do if you were going to try to enact mind control on a crowd and Trump hits nine of them. You could argue whether he means to do it or not, but he undoubtedly is extraordinarily talented in that area from a lifetime of self promotion and promotion of his business. It is amazing.
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| Hillary Clinton at the time of this broadcast has spent 40 million dollars in Florida, and they are basically tied, and Trump has spent zero, zero. Nothing. He hasn’t spent a dime in Florida because of his ability to get his message out and to get the press to carry, a hostile press, by the way, a press which is opposed to his candidacy. This is where I think the genius lies in the Trump phenomenon, again, whether it’s intention or not, who knows. The genius is he crafts a message that the hostile media thinks will hurt him, therefore they carry it far and wide, and he’s somehow figured out how to subvert that, so when the people who hear the message that are supposed to make them hate him hear it, they go, “Wait, I agree with that. Yeah. He’s making a lot of sense to me.”
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| The media casts it in these terms that this is how you should understand this, and people hear that but they don’t understand what the media commentator is saying, but they do understand what Trump is saying, and so there’s something there when it comes to human psychology, undoubtedly, that he has tapped into.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Like I said, I have never seen anybody play to his base as effectively as what he’s doing.
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| Mark Gleason: | Who is his base, right? He’s taken the center. He’s taken the right, but a lot of the far right hate him.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | I had this discussion with somebody the other day because they were saying, “Oh, Trump is a psychopath and he’s this and he’s that.” That might be true. That might be true. He might be a sociopath with narcissistic-
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| Mark Gleason: | Everything is relative. Calling Trump a sociopath …
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| Aaron Fenzi: | With narcissistic personality disorder.
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| Mark Gleason: | … with narcissistic tendencies when he’s running against a Clinton, those are some big words to be throwing around that contest.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | You could argue that both of them are. You could absolutely. You could absolutely.
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| Mark Gleason: | On relatively safe ground you could throw a lot of those words around this contest. Aaron, you were talking earlier about the concept of workers and what was the other word you used?
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Wrestlers.
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| Mark Gleason: | Wrestlers. You were talking about the difference between workers and wrestlers. I thought that was very interesting and I think there’s probably … It makes a good analogy for the working world where there are people who contribute on different levels. Would you mind spelling out that idea?
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Certainly.
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| Mark Gleason: | I think our listeners would enjoy it.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | For those of you who watch pro wrestling you have two guys in the ring at once, or four guys, tag team. A wrestler is somebody who can execute moves competently. A worker is somebody who knows how to elicit emotion from a crowd or somebody who can get people into the building. It was an old carnival term. It means I’m going to work this crowd into getting them to think what I want them to think or do what I want them to do. The most important thing a wrestler can do is a be a worker, and a worker is somebody who draws money.
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| Mark Gleason: | Okay. That’s very important. I love this analogy and let me explain why. People in my management consulting career, the most common question I get asked is why am I not moving up in this organization. I started as a whatever. I started as a broker, a database person, a programmer, a business analyst, whatever, however you started. They got promoted, one, two, three, four levels. At some point they stopped.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | They plateau.
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| Mark Gleason: | They plateau and they don’t advance, and this is the reason, when you’re a good wrestler, and by wrestler I mean when you’re good at the skillset required: you’re a good carpenter, you’re a good plumber, you’re a good computer programmer, that takes you from beginner programmer to junior programmer, to mid, to senior, to a manager of programmers. One level up from wherever that top is has an entirely different skill set. It’s a management skill set that has to understand the business you’re in, the money that’s coming in, who are our customers, why are they buying our product, how can we position ourselves better, what does our management want, how can we give our management what they need so that they can position themselves better in the market.
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| This whole new skill set has to occur, that has to do with words, has to do with management, and it has to do with paradigm, the ability to see other perspectives that was not necessary as you were working your way up. Here you showcase the exact same concepts that I’ve been putting forward for a long time, which is in the wrestling world there are the people who figure out, “Okay. I need to learn how to wrestle. Let me learn some moves. Let me get into shape.” They go so far. It is the people who learn the meta-game: why are people coming, why are even people paying for tickets.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | How do I get more people to …
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| Mark Gleason: | How do I get more people?
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| Aaron Fenzi: | … buy tickets?
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| Mark Gleason: | What are the mechanics of this thing? Maybe I need to make myself look less good in order to get more people in, and it is this meta-game beyond the individual. You have to see many different perspectives: of the promoter, of the person backing it, of the landlord who is renting you the hall, of all the different people who are coming in and all of their different perspectives, because many of them are coming for different reasons. It is this complicated game that it’s almost at its rawest form in this professional wrestling, because it is like theater and combat kind of blended, and this perspective of a wrestler and worker is just fascinating to me. With that context of how it relates to the business world could you please continue with some more detail as to how you see the difference between a wrestler and a worker?
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Let me go back to something you said. You said something, I need to look less good. That’s actually not true at all. You want to look as good as humanly possible. You want to look bigger than life. That means if you have to get to the gym four or five days a week, you get into the gym five days a week.
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| Mark Gleason: | What I meant by that was you might need to lose a match or you might have to sacrifice a moment where you could cash in right now and look great, but you might make the person you’re working with look foolish, and therefore even though you’re winning in the moment, in the long term game you’ve actually hurt yourself.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | There have been instances where you have your place on a card, on a show. You could be in the first match or anyway through up until the main event. The story goes is that the main event is what your audience pays to see. They pay to see the main event. Everything else is a set up to the main event. There are many different facets of a wrestling show. I always say to the first people on the show, “Make your match look as unspectacular as possible.”
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| Mark Gleason: | Wait. Repeat that again.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Make your first match on the show.
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| Mark Gleason: | The first match of the show, the appetizer.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | The appetizer. I’m glad you said that because it is exactly like having a meal. You don’t have your entrée as soon as you walk in the door.
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| Mark Gleason: | If I had an extraordinary appetizer which was way better than the next course and then the entrée and then dessert, I will leave there saying, “The appetizer was good but the rest of it wasn’t very good.”
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Absolutely. If you notice the way they design portions in restaurants, you don’t get a huge portion as an appetizer. You get a small portion and it leads up bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and it’s more elaborate as you go on. That’s by design. There’s no accident there. The same thing should happen at a wrestling show, and keep in mind you have to take your audience on a roller coaster ride. You can’t have the same level of excitement for every match, because you’re going to burn your crowd out before you get to the end. Again, your first match shouldn’t be spectacular anyway because your audience wants to see a wrestling match, so they’re going to be excited for you anyway just for the sake that you’re in the ring.
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| You don’t have to go above and beyond. Just do your match. Make it as basic as possible, and I also fault people when they don’t pay attention to the match before them. The next guys will go out and have basically the same match, so you’re watching the same thing throughout the entire show. I always make it a point if I want to do something during my match I’ll say to the other guys, “Hey, are you doing this?”
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| Mark Gleason: | Okay, so because you’ve been in the business world as well as a consultant, let me just ask you to draw a parallel here. If I’m in a meeting and there’s five of us to go, you’d certainly want to come off as good as possible. You want management to see you and say, “This person is good.” You also could be spectacular, but by doing so in the second segment of the presentation you could blow your entire presentation out of the water, so at the cost of your team, at the cost of the overall presentation you may be able to seize the moment and look fantastic and steal the show, but there could be a long term cost to that. You could lose the deal. You could lose the sale. There’s all kinds of ramifications from that.
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| I’m assuming that in wrestling you have these stand outs who decide it is their show regardless of where they are falling on the card and they grab the spotlight. What are the pros and cons from that? They get more attention, but what happens to them, and in your experience is it overall positive or negative to do that?
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| Aaron Fenzi: | I want to talk about something you brought up regarding the business scenario while doing a presentation, and we’ve discussed this on a number of occasions throughout our 21 year friendship, and that is …
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| Mark Gleason: | I have known you for 21 years. That’s correct.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | … you can’t give yourself credibility. Somebody else has to give you credibility. Let’s say you’re working on a deal and the person who is talking maybe screws up the presentation, maybe slightly, but the other person doesn’t know. The other people in the room don’t know except for one person on the team, and then that person takes over. All eyes go from the guy who is leading the presentation to the guy who just opened his mouth. It was like a scene in Get Shorty, the movie with Travolta and the all-star cast, and I recall the scene where he said, he had the two guys, Jon Gries and Delroy Lindo, and he said, “Who am I talking to? Am I talking to him or am I talking to you?” Delroy Lindo said, “You can talk to me.” He said, “That’s what I thought.”
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| There has to be a pecking order in a business scenario, and you always have to give your guy credibility. I know you can steal the moment and make a name for yourself, but there are times and there are places to do that. Something like that is not the time or the place to do that. I’m of the opinion that you excel based on your work, not by whether or not you can sandbag someone or throw that person under the bus. There’s a saying, “I don’t have to blow out your candle to make mine shine brighter.” That’s something I live by. Let’s say you and I are in a business meeting and you didn’t know the answer to a question. I could give you the answer. I could give it to you personally and then you answer the question, the vendor or whomever has, or I could just get up and take over.
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| If I were to do that, okay, it would make me look good temporarily, but then that would cause a strain in our relationship, and it would be damaged from then on. Again, if we do things the right way then we don’t have to worry about that. Again, opportunities come along, but they don’t have to come along at other people’s expenses.
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| Mark Gleason: | That’s interesting. I was at an investment bank years ago, and I had a peer and we had a project where I had to do a piece of it and he had to do a piece of it. The big bosses, the big management were coming to talk to us about that and other things, and right before we went to this meeting I checked to make sure it was working. It wasn’t. I was pretty confident it wasn’t on my side of this arrangement, so we go into this meeting and the management is going around the table, and they ask, “By the way, is this working?” I give the answer, very diplomatic answer. I didn’t want to throw him under the bus, and I have a general understanding that throwing either one of us under the bus is only going to make all of us look bad.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | That’s absolutely right.
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| Mark Gleason: | I answer, “Yes, we’re working out the final steps right now. It will be working. We’re testing it. We’re almost there.” He volunteers for himself, “Well, actually my piece is working. I’m not sure about Mark’s, but I know mine is working.” I turn my head and I look at him incredulous, and I had the presence of mind not to respond. I just, “We’ll get it working.” Because I understand that bickering makes us even look smaller than we already do here. The meeting ends because we had many levels of management. This is an investment bank. We have many levels of management in the meeting.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | By the way, where was this?
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| Mark Gleason: | This is an investment bank that you’re familiar with that you yourself have done some work at. We go back to our room where I point out to him, “Hey, buddy, your stuff is not working. It’s not my stuff. The reason I was being diplomatic is because your stuff is broken and I did not want to make you look ridiculous. Isn’t it interesting how in that meeting I was protecting you from looking and you used that to try to make me look ridiculous?” Fortunately for me part of my calculation here was that my direct management in this investment bank was in the room, several levels were in the room. I knew at least two of my direct manager and his manager, when I went to them and explained to them what I had done, explained to them how it was not my fault, explained to them how I refrained, I took the hit and refrained from bickering about whose fault it really was because I understood how small that would make us look in our department.
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| It would look like things were ridiculously out of control in our area. It made us all look small, so I refrained. I took the hit that, okay, we’re working on it. Afterwards I very aggressively confronted my co-worker who was shocked and chagrinned, not nearly enough for my taste, to discover it was actually his problem which I was quite certain it was, but when I went to my management after that and explained to them what I had done, that I had taken basically a bullet for the team in front of their bosses, they were extraordinarily grateful. My direct manager, I earned his trust that day, that I was not trying to make myself look good even though I have a great deal of pride and I want to be seen as doing a good job, but that I could see the meta-game.
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| I could see that it wasn’t just about me looking good at any cost regardless of the cost, because there was very high costs that day if our whole department was made to look foolish. That earned me a huge amount of credibility and cost my coworker a huge amount of credibility. That’s a game he never saw. He’s level one. He sees his perception only. He saw his point of view and he saw some limited way where in the moment he might be able to make himself look better and he took it. He is scratching his head years later why he’s never advanced in business. I saw the immediate game. I saw my managers’ perspectives and how horrified they were we were even bickering over this even though I wasn’t really bickering. I saw the perspective of the big managers.
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| By seeing the different levels here I was able to navigate this thing in a way where I took a short term hit from the high-ups who will never see me again, but I won the lifelong loyalty of my immediate management which served me quite well for the next few years. Just tie it back then to the wrestling, you have these young bucks who swagger into the wrestling world. They have their place on the card. This thing is like a symphony. It’s going to rise. It’s going to fall. It’s going to rise. It’s going to fall. It’s going to hit a crescendo, and leave the audience like, “Wow. That was a great show.” They come in hitting some bad notes because they’re second in the lineup and they want to be the superstars.
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| Like in my story where my coworker, it cost him. It cost him a huge amount of credibility in our department for him to make that play, do they pay a price for that?
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| Aaron Fenzi: | They can. They certainly can. Promoters might be reluctant to use those guys. They might be reluctant to put them on the show. Sometimes promoters get sucked into that and they say, “Oh, these guys are great. They can flip and they can do all this acrobatic stuff, and that’s great.” Did you get anybody into a building? That’s the bottom line with pro wrestling. There’s a couple of things. The bottom line is money. You have to be able to get people to pay to see you.
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| Mark Gleason: | That’s why I like it as an example. It’s pure. If you succeed there will be more people in the seats next week. If you don’t succeed, if you have some kind of flair and you take over the show, but people leave feeling kind of low and crestfallen, then guess what? The next three weeks you’re going to have lower numbers.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | That’s true.
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| Mark Gleason: | You can’t get closer to the market than that.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Everybody says, “Oh, it’s fake. It’s fake.” It’s not sports. It has not been considered to be a sport ever since the carnival days. Everybody knew it was fake. Everybody knew it was fake, but there’s certain people out there, “Oh, maybe there’s some realism about this.”
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| Mark Gleason: | When I was in seventh grade and we were putting each other in figure four leg locks it was seeming pretty real, but even then I was telling people, “Come on guys, this can’t be real.” Everybody has a moment.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | They do.
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| Mark Gleason: | People struggle to figure out when that moment is, and I’m going to define that moment as when you stop being a team player and you make a bid to help yourself stand out from the crowd. The problem is most people choose that moment extraordinarily poorly.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Completely inappropriately.
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| Mark Gleason: | Life is full of hilarious examples of people who decide, “Now is my moment,” and they step up and they get knocked out or they get fired or they get demolished in some way, and everybody turns to them and goes, “Wow. That was not your moment.”
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| Aaron Fenzi: | There are actually three instances that I can think of right now all in the NFL where guys for whatever reason took over and made the absolute most of their opportunity. One was a guy named Jim Plunkett who quarterbacked the Oakland Raiders.
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| Mark Gleason: | That sounds like the beginning of a limerick. Is that the beginning of a limerick? There once was a guy named Jim Plunkett.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Right. Doesn’t it? Yeah. A dirty limerick by the way. I think he was from Nantucket, I’m not sure, but in any case.
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| Mark Gleason: | I just want to preface this, in fairness to the listeners …
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Go ahead.
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| Mark Gleason: | … I just want to say that I was once in an ESPN bar. Yes, there is one of those. Up in-
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| Aaron Fenzi: | There was one. I don’t know if it’s still there.
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| Mark Gleason: | There was one. There was in New York a sports radio show broadcast …
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Thankfully it was about football.
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| Mark Gleason: | … being done in the ESPN bar in New York where they were asking trivia questions, in general, of anybody I think who wanted to call in or in the bar who wanted to answer. I witnessed this entire production devolve into them simply questioning you specifically saying, “He can’t know this. Oh, wow. Okay. Hold on. Okay. You can’t know this. Wow.” Your sports knowledge is encyclopedic.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | I will say this, thankfully it was all football questions because if they had given me any type of baseball questions other than Don Larsen pitching the only perfect World Series.
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| Mark Gleason: | I mentioned sports, right?
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| Aaron Fenzi: | I’m going to bring this back to wrestling again. Part of what you do in the ring, the most important thing you can do is sell. What that means is you sell a move like it’s hurting you, like it was the most devastating thing, like you could sell a punch like you took a shot from a 22 caliber rifle. That’s the thing. That’s how you make your opponent look good, and that’s how you look good. You sell properly. You sell a punch like it hurt. You sell a move like it just destroyed your back. Bring it back to European football. Guy goes down, he sells his knee like he just got shot in it.
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| Mark Gleason: | That’s different.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | That’s my point. He’s selling an injury sometimes to a comical point because you know there’s no … I saw the way he fell. There’s no way. He’s acting like his tibia is coming right out of his skin. You know who Hope Solo is?
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| Mark Gleason: | Yes. I do.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | You do. For our listeners, Hope Solo is the goalie of the US women’s soccer team.
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| Mark Gleason: | Did you date her? Tell me you dated her.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Believe it or not …
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| Mark Gleason: | You have a …
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| Aaron Fenzi: | No. I never have.
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| Mark Gleason: | You have quite a long list of …
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| Aaron Fenzi: | No. Believe me …
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| Mark Gleason: | It would not surprise me.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | No. This would not surprise me either. I actually once was banned from her Facebook account.
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| Mark Gleason: | You had to date her.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | I’ll tell you why. No. A couple of years ago they were playing China in the World Cup of women’s soccer, and I said, “Hope, I hope you guys beat the Chinese like you beat your family.” She was brought in on charges of domestic abuse against her sister and her sister’s son who is five foot nine, keep in mind.
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| Mark Gleason: | I recall that.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | That comment was, I was banned immediately. I cannot post on this girl’s page. Thankfully I found her Twitter account and just went completely bananas today.
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| Mark Gleason: | Is there anything that you would like to plug while you’re on the show? Is there any business interest or website that you would like to plug while you’re here?
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Go to thetanagency.com if you need yourself an insurance broker, and we would be more than happy to take care of you. We are the place to go.
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| Mark Gleason: | Very good. What is that URL?
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| Aaron Fenzi: | It is www.thetannagency.com.
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| Mark Gleason: | Okay. Very good. I’m assuming we’re going to deal with somebody even wiser than yourself.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Potentially.
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| Mark Gleason: | Very good.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | But we don’t know. I don’t even know if there is anybody wiser than myself, but who knows.
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| Mark Gleason: | You know what, that is a profound question.
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Right.
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| Mark Gleason: | In one of the rare cases where you’re in the APEX Level To Power studio the answer would be, “Yes. There is.”
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| Aaron Fenzi: | Debatable, but whatever.
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| Speaker 2: | This has been the APEX Level To Power podcast with your host Mark Gleason. The podcast where your opinion changes but you still get to feel right. The one ability we cannot give ourselves is credibility. You have to give that to us, so please like, subscribe, or write a review. Change your level, change your life, and you can change the world. Welcome to APEX Level To Power.
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