Surprises Can Teach Us A Lot

In this podcast, Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner shares some surprises.

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This video was recorded on April 19, 2023.

David Gardner: One of the most powerful forms of learning, which also happens to be one of the best tricks in storytelling is surprise. Surprise, whether you're listening to someone else tell a story or literally living one yourself at the time. When something not just unexpected but extremely unexpected happens, these become some of the most memorable stories of our lives, someone else's or our own. Sometimes it's highly ironic what happens. Other times it's just way better or worse, but I prefer better away, better ending than we were expecting. This week we're going to debut a new series on Rule Breaker Investing. It's entitled simply, Surprise. Tell a few short stories that surprise. Did you know that David actually beat Goliath? Only on this week's Rule Breaker Investing.

Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. Hope you enjoyed our Review-a-Palooza last week reviewing two past April five-stock samplers. Thanks again to my guests, Jason Moser and Jim Mueller. In our original studios, the original Fool global headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia. Well, we've had a lot of storytelling this month because telling their stories, Volume 5 kicked us off in April with Jeff Fischer and Kirsten Guerra, talented Motley Fool stock pickers and analysts. I want to continue some storytelling this week because surprising stories are my favorites. Obviously, the ones with surprisingly good endings. I'll be leading off with one as an example. But I think these are such instructive moments for us in life. The reason as I let off at the top that I think these are so memorable is because they go so against our inclinations, they go again, the conventional wisdom or our expectations at the time I see this in investing, I see this in business, and I see this in life. I think it's worth calling out and actually making a series for this. While I'll be telling five today, there are a lot more than just these. In this month's mailbag, which is next week, if you want email us [email protected] if you have a great story of your own or a popular one that ends with or features surprise. Well, I'd love to help tell that on next week's mailbag.

Stories, a big theme for this April and especially this week, surprising stories from investing, business and life. Let's get it started. Surprise, number 1. I think maybe the most iconic movie, surprise, at least for many of us, I would even say of all generations, but maybe I'll just include those of us who grew up in the '80s, if you like. Although this movie first came out, I think in 1939, but every year back before there was streaming entertainment back before there were DVDs or even VHS tapes. Back when you had to wait for network TV to show you a movie, unless you got to see it in the theater every year, The Wizard of Oz would come on. It was usually, I think somewhere in the spring it would come on network television and I would watch it once again every year. When we think about surprises, I think maybe the most iconic surprise in American cinema, is when you discover, along with Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion. But it was really Toto that reveal this, the little dog. You discover that The Great and Powerful Oz was neither. It was just a dude. A dude who'd somehow blown into Oz. I never did read the book itself, but had set up shop and use technology to fool the people of Oz. 

The great and powerful Oz, as it turns out, was a man using some smoke and mirrors behind a curtain. That was the shocking, surprised. I think for me, maybe for you, I'll just speak for me, that was the iconic moment where I realized, the world actually, is not often what it looks like, and it can be a lot better than it looks. Now that moment where you discover that The Wizard of Oz was just a dude, was not the only key surprise. I'm thinking in particular of a second surprise later in that movie. Again, if you watch this movie at formative ages multiple times as I did anyway, it really sets the tone in a lot of ways for the rest of your life, especially if you take it seriously as I clearly did with The Wizard of Oz. My favorite moment and I would say and even bigger surprise is when, and I hope I don't have to issue a spoiler alert, but I will anyway, feel free to skip forward about 60 seconds and not have the ending of The Wizard of Oz spoiled for you, but you're ready? Dorothy, by mistake, splashes water on the wicked witch of the West, and she melts. She's in her castle surrounded by her guards. I think technically they're called the Winkie Guards, but I just think of it as those big, scary-looking guardsmen with those long spheres. As Dorothy who feels apologetic as she's just melted the wicked witch of the West, as Dorothy looks around, I, the young viewer was thinking, oh my golly, is she in trouble now? Yet what happens is the Winkie Guards all kneel, drop their spears and say, "Hail to Dorothy, the wicked, witch is dead." That for me is probably the even bigger surprise in a movie of surprises. 

But again, for so many of us for whom this movie is iconic and maybe formative, it's worth recognizing how powerful those surprises, especially the good surprises are. I think in part, I was growing up during the cold war. Some of you listening to me, were too. For some of you, the cold war is nothing you ever experienced. It's just something in your rear view mirror. But there's a lot of one-to-one as I think about The Wizard of Oz and then the cold war itself. Because for those of us who grew up with the iron curtain, a sense that the world was threatened, there were bad people on the other side of that iron curtain, and we often built them up into things much scarier or more formidable than they actually were, and to have had 1989 happen, 1988 and then 1999, and the world open up. I think for a lot of us who recognize ourselves as optimists, I'll say with Matt Ridley, rational optimists, I think there's a natural optimism in us fueled by that same sense, that all hail to Dorothy, the wicked witch is dead as the cold war ended, I think the good guys won. I'm pretty persuaded by that myself. I realized there may be deferring viewpoints out there. But we had so built up the idea that the Soviet Union was a formidable, scary power. Then what we ultimately saw was its economy was weak and it imploded and collapsed from the center. As I close up hail to Dorothy, the wicked witch is dead, which for this new series, Surprise feels like the right story to lead off with. I think it's helpful to have a lesson for each of the stories, and for this one, for me, I think the lesson is, it's often better than you think. I think it's worth remembering that especially when the market has been weak or the world has been a little bit crazy, or you are always hearing how divided America is. I actually think it's better than you think. There are far more centrists living today in the United States of America than there are extremists on the so-called left or the so-called right. 

So many more of us are regular every day, centrists. It's just the other guys get all the headlines. Often we build up in our minds these ideas that, well, Oz must be great and powerful and the wicked witch must have the whole world enthralled to her. Well, we'll be talking about at least an investing story or two going forward, but things are often better than you think it. It's hard to keep that in mind sometimes, especially when you're in fearful circumstances. Surprised, number 1, hail to Dorothy, the wicked witch is dead. Surprise number 2, this one comes from my own investing. Although if you'd ever bought with me at any point through Motley Fool Stock Advisor shares in Priceline, which later became booking.com, then it's maybe a surprise you've had as well. This is a story I've told once or twice before in the podcasts, but now that we're in our eighth year, I think many listening have never heard this story, so I'm not going to assume anybody knows this one. It's good to bring these back from time-to-time. 

Surprise number 2, me and Priceline. Priceline was a stock. It was a company that had William Shatner as the front man advertising for naming your price to travel, maybe name your price with an airline, name your price with a hotel. The idea was maybe that airline or that hotel actually has a little bit of negotiating room, maybe the plane isn't full, maybe the hotel isn't full, so name your price. William Shatner, who of course many of us remember as Captain Kirk on Star Trek, was also a comic actor, at least in these ads. He would sing and Priceline was a public company and the ticker symbol, again was PCLN. I decided to recommend it a few years after the dot-com crash. Early days of Motley Fool Stock Advisor, which launched in 2002, I think I recommended it in 2004. Its long enough ago. It doesn't really matter whether it was 2002, '03, or '04, what I can tell you is that I was completely wrong in my recommendation. 

History will show and anybody who's subscribed to Motley Fool Stock Advisor can go back and see all the original content of all our write-ups and reports. Booking, which is today an active stock recommendation at the Motley Fool and has a ticker symbol, BKNG is what Priceline became, but let me just explain, especially to people who don't know the story, what my thinking was about Priceline at the time. I did a write-up suggesting that the reason I'm recommending Priceline this month, I said to our dear members, is because I believe this company as the third or fourth bit player in a larger travel industry, the online travel company. I believe this company, I said will get bought out. I don't think in a consolidating world, likely an oligopoly. I don't expect Priceline to still be around and so we're going to be buying this stock, I said, in some random month in 2004 because this is probably going to get bought out at a premium at some point. It certainly is a lover of tabletop board games. I remember very explicitly that I compared the situation to the tabletop board game Acquire, which some of you will know. For those who don't, I'm not going to explain the rules other than just say that part of the game of Acquire as a tile-laying game and a stock market game, you're dropping tiles on the board and as they connect to other tiles that will merge together groups of tiles as if they're companies, corporations, or hotels depending on the theme. Acquire has been issued in many different editions in the five plus decades that it's been out, but anyway, the key to Acquire is trying to find the smaller companies, the smaller groups of tiles on the board, buy shares in those, own those. 

Then when it touches a bigger one on the board, it gets eaten up and you get bought out at a premium, it gets liquidated, you get cashback, which then enables you to buy even more shares of other companies on the game board. It's one of the ways to win the game of Acquire. I very explicitly wrote my bi-reports saying this is the game of Acquire and Priceline is a small corporation or hotel chain that will get bought out in this board game of life. Well, history will show that Priceline never did get bought out by anybody. In fact, Priceline started to get more successful, the Internet began to recover, Amazon had dropped from 95-7. People thought that e-commerce wasn't going to work in late 2001, early 2002. Well, Priceline ended up buying Booking, which was a very similar hotel travel airline platform site serving Europe and then Priceline added Agora from the Far East and all of a sudden, Priceline became the number 1 online booking platform worldwide for planes, trains, and automobiles, and hotels too. It renamed itself booking after it's more popular European brand and today that's why Priceline is Booking. The surprise is that I and you too if you are following me at the time, got the thesis completely wrong and yet it became a spectacular performer. 

Today I still own some shares. I've used some of those shares to buy a house at one point, given some to charity. Today, it is a 130 bagger from that price back in 2004. It's up more than 130 times in value, which is a perfectly iconic demonstration of the beauty of great surprises. Being wrong and yet I think the lesson here is, of course, buying to hold. If you buy to hold, you can be wrong with your original thesis because you undershot or underestimated what that company, what that stock that you bought might become one day. If your tendency is just to keep holding and not trying to be too smart, not trying to always be right with your original thesis, or to feel like you can foresee where things are headed, I sure couldn't, I had no sense of booking or global domination for Priceline when I listened to William Shatner and recommended the stock in the early 2000s. What a joy it's been for me personally and I hope dear fellow Fool for you too as well, especially if you've been around the Motley Fool for a long period of time. While this story is focused on Priceline becoming booking. 

I have seen all manner of different caterpillars become butterflies over the course of time. It's also worth pointing out, of course, before we move on to surprise number 3, that sometimes you're surprised the other direction. Boy, if we didn't see that with five stocks for the coronavirus in last week's Review-a-Palooza, if you miss that, feel free to watch what happens in reverse when something that looked amazing, all of a sudden becomes horrifically bad. I think the longer we live on this Earth, the more we're going to see stories both directions, but the real benefit of this app episodic series Surprise, is to identify the really positive things that happen because those are not only the most fun surprises, but they're often life-changing, or at least mindset changing for those who've either lived it or come across these as stories. Surprise number 2, Priceline. Well, from the stock market, we're going to move on to surprise number 3. I'm going to stick with games. We just talked about Acquire and let us stick with games here, but really just focus on games and describe for you as surprising conversation I had with one of the world's best tabletop strategy game designers. His name is Reiner Knizia and Reiner, is not only a friend of mine, but I've shared him as I tried to this podcast with you, share my friends with you. Reiner, join me on this podcast a few years ago to talk about the business of board games and designing board games. When I first met Reiner, I had a very surprising moment. It was for my birthday at the time and my brother, so generous as my brother always has been, and the likes to create surprises for others in fact, it was Tom's birthday this week and I tried to surprise them by dropping through my Twitter feed. I'm @DavidGFool on Twitter. 

One of my favorite pictures of Tom because he's with the Motley crew. The Motley Fool has joined with The Motley crew, will at least six. You can see that picture on Twitter. If you want that's a surprise, but Tom is great at creating surprises for others. He surprised me by flying Reiner Knizia, my favorite game designer from the UK, which is where Reiner was living at the time, to Washington DC to hang out for a couple of days playing games. The surprising moment occurred when we threw down what to me is maybe Reiner Knizia's greatest game. He's designed hundreds and hundreds of games, which is actually part of the reason this is a surprising story, but in particular, at least at the time, Tigris and Euphrates, a remarkable tiling strategy game, very accessible, but also like chess, very deep, very replayable. We started setting up Tigris and Euphrates on the game table as Reiner was sitting there and I and a few other friends, maybe Tom too at the table, we're setting up the game. Reiner turns to us all and says, with a smile, how do we play? To be clear again, this was, in my mind, this great designers, greatest game. We were setting it up, expecting he might throw in an extra ruler too and he turned to the rest of us at the table and said, how do we play? What I learned that day is that that was a sincere question from the designer himself. It wasn't that he didn't know how to play. It was that he didn't know the particular rule set for this game that he had designed years before and that's because as we learned later in conversation that day, he has designed, first of all, hundreds of games. If you've done that enough times, if you've written hundreds of books or shot hundreds of movies, you might not remember every line of every book or every scene of every movie that you've ever made. 

That might be true of you anyway. But imagine if you're a game designer and when you come out with a great game like Tigris and Euphrates, but then it gets translated into 40 different languages and sold by different publishers in different countries some of which sometimes change the rules of your game, tweaking it for whatever reason, up or down, you can all of a sudden see how one of the great board game designers of our time would be sitting there at the table with you asking you how you play his game. That is surprised. Number 3 one of my favorites looking back on it and I'm attaching a lesson to each of these. I guess the most obvious lesson that I think of first of all is, you never really know what's going on in someone else's head. We're constantly thinking that we know enough about other people that we probably know what they're thinking at any given point in time. Now, in this case, I was really meeting Reiner for the first time so I didn't have a long association with him. But a lot of us are making assumptions a lot of the time and I think the lesson back then is, first of all, don't make those assumptions because, well, how do we play? That's why I think it's helpful to ask and I'm even talking about with your deepest friends or your spouse or partner. I would recommend not always thinking you know what's going on in his or her head. Ask. Then one other quick lesson that occurs to me as I think about this is one of my favorite lessons taught through this podcast and my writings and work over the years. My phrase lead a more interesting life. If you want to listen to a short podcast, I would say in mini-sermon, I think that's a 10 or 15 minute podcast. It's one of the cardinal lessons of my own experience in life and that is to get out there and meet interesting people and have interesting experiences. In this case, it was my brother's generosity envision that created an interesting possibility of me meeting somebody that I deeply admire. 

But the only way to really have these human moments and to get these insights and have this person say, how do we play and learn why he would say that and what that says about him and how the world works is to go out and pursue these moments to lead a more interesting life. There we go. Surprise number 3, Reiner Knizia asking, how do we play? Well, in the same way that surprise number 2 was about the stock market and games and then I brought games over into number 3. I'm going to bring from number 3 the concept of leading a more interesting life into number 4, as I describe a meeting that I had once with a famous soccer player. Surprise number 4 is entitled Heather O'Reilly. I've talked about soccer football if you like, off and on, on this podcast, often railing against the idea of penalty kicks. That's not where I'm going today. It's my way of saying that I have a passing association with the game. I tend to be somebody who doesn't really have a team but when the world cup starts for men or women, I'll often gets sucked in and start watching into the same way that I don't really watch golf but can get sucked in to the masters. I mean who didn't play soccer at some point in their youth. I can certainly look back on some fun moments on the pitch myself, although I didn't even play in high school, but I like soccer. I admire soccer. 

But this is also a way of saying, I don't necessarily recognize who are the great soccer players. If back in the day I'd walked past Pele, I probably would have recognized Pele because I remember he was in the movie Victory and he was a well-known, well-photographed, well really an international celebrity and maybe I would recognize a few soccer players but for the most part, i could walk past you and you could be an Olympic champion and I wouldn't know that you've got that in soccer and that was the experience I had in 2006 when I was visiting the University of North Carolina to give a talk to the business school. One of the fun ironies of my life is I was only ever just an English literature major at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. But I've had the pleasure and honor of speaking a few times to the business school over the years as an entrepreneur even though I never did get an MBA and one of those times was 2006 and for that visit, I was staying, effectively in a bed and breakfast. At breakfast that morning, I think my brother Tom was there with me as well, but we were also joined by a young woman and her name is Heather and we said, "Good morning." She said, "Hey, who are you guys?" We said, "Well, we're the Fools and we're speaking at the business school today and what about you? Why are you here in Chapel Hill?" She said, "Oh, well, I'm going to be at the basketball game this afternoon because they're going to be retiring my jersey." At that point my eyebrows raised and Tom and I looked at each other and not really knowing what was going on here. She went on to explain that she had been in all Americans soccer player for UNC women's soccer. 

But because the biggest draw of all is probably men's basketball games at the Dean Dome, they tend to do big ceremonies at halftime of the men's basketball games and so that was the game she was going to that afternoon to have her jersey retired. I think Heather was probably 21 years old. It was 2006. Wikipedia did exist. It was still early days for Wikipedia, but I figured I should probably go google her, read up on her and Wikipedia to know more about her than I did so that at the next morning's breakfast, I could show more appreciation for Heather O'Reilly and her career. So I did and I read this about the 2000 for Athens Summer Olympics. I'm reading today from Heather's page, but it said basically this 17 years ago as well. "After recovering from a broken fibular from a match the year before, O'Reilly made the national team roster for the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens. At 19 years old, she was the youngest player on the roster. On August 23, 2004, she scored the match-winning goal in the Olympics semifinal match against Germany, propelling the US into the final in which they defeated Brazil for the gold medal." Wow, I wish I could do something like that once in my life. Of course, Heather's done that any number of times in different ways over the course of a long and story career which even continues through to this day. She's now won several Olympic gold metals and received all kinds of plot. It's one of the most decorated and experienced female players in US soccer. History. Well, anyway, the next morning at breakfast, I was ready. Tom and I probably started in on our scrambled eggs and Heather arrived. We congratulate her on having her jersey retired. 

Asked how the ceremony had been the day before we'd been speaking in the business school and then I said, and Heather, I read, amazing congratulations couple of years ago. At the age of 19, you scored the winning goal in the Olympics semifinals to propel our team into the gold-medal game that we won. Wow, what was that like? She sheepishly smiled, demerge for a second and told it like this. "Well, it's funny you mentioned that guys because that is true. But here's what happened. I was the youngest player on the team. I was not a starter. And so the game had gone into overtime against Germany and I got subbed in." Somewhere again they've already gone through the full 90 minutes of regulation and everybody's pretty tired, Heather's now on the field. The game develops to the point that Heather gets a perfect pass from an experienced, exhausted teammate and Heather has an open corner of the goal in front of her and she kicks and misses and she turns back to that person and that person happened to be Mia Hamm. Mia Hamm, probably the greatest women's soccer player in US history who was of course older and experienced at that point was exhausted and here's this new 19-year-old kid who comes in in the semifinal games.

Sets her up with a perfect pass and Heather wofs and she turned back and looked at our hero and Mia went with an eye roll and turned away. Tired. Minutes later, Heather got another pass, kicked it in and the rest is history of the US, won that semifinal match and eventually the gold medal. Surprising for me as the listener of the story, what of course comes out as so surprising to me is when you read the Wikipedia line, it looks like Heather isn't all out here, all the youngest player in the team sending us into the gold medal match. But when you hear it, the human moments, how it actually happened and that vulnerably, she made a big mistake, looked back and saw her hero, eye roll her, how can our hearts and also our smiles not go out to? Of course, it helps that the story has a very happy ending. But I think the lesson here is that heroes are a lot more human than you would often expect and I would also add that those that show their humanity through humility, through their own vulnerability, those heroes become, I think, even more heroic. For me, Heather O'Reilly has always been one of those people. Of course, she went on to do so much more as a professional from that story moment in 2006 but there we were at the bed and breakfast hearing the actual story of how we beat Germany. Onto surprise number 5. Well, this one didn't happen to me or in my presence but it did happen to a friend of mine who told me the story and I have used this story in speeches many a time, ever since, over the last couple of decades because it contains one of those memorable surprises and also teaches its own valuable lessons. My friend Charles, who Tom and I met through the radio show, The Motley Fool Radio Show, which we initially did as an AM Collin radio show 3 hours coast-to-coast. Eventually, we transitioned it to NPR. But these were the early days and Charles was for our AM radio show, one of our producers and he told the story of the birthday party that they'd recently had for their young child. 

Charles and his wife, and Charles, I hope you're listening today, I haven't seen in a long time, and if so, drop me a note or a direct message. But anyway, Charles and his wife, for their first kid, let's just make up its nursery school, maybe the child is five, they had their first at-home birthday party inviting friends from school. They decided to get a pinata which they purchased maybe the 7-Eleven. And for our purposes, let's go with a horse. Let's go with a bright purple horse. A bright purple pinata and so the kids come over and they pass around, let's go with spiked wiffle bird, whatever kids are swinging these days. A pinata is probably overstuffed, oversized pinatas for little kids, and maybe it was the big kid finally, maybe it was their child who had the kudos gross who whacked that pinata hard enough that it popped open. In the shocking moment, the surprise, not just for Charles and his wife but for their child and all of the kids at the birthday party is when that pinata popped open, nothing came out. I like to feature positive surprises. Most of our stories this week are happy surprises. This was not a happy moment for anybody at that birthday party but a particular surprise for Charles and his wife. Charles went on to tell me the story this way, he basically said, so why was the pinata empty? The reason is because we hadn't bought any of the candies or goggles to fill it. And why did we not buy anything to put in our child's birthday pinata? Because we didn't know they didn't already come fully stuffed. 

When we bought the purple horse, we thought it already had everything in it. Well, the good news is that for Charles and his wife, one of them quickly drove back to the 711, bought a lot of candy and toys, and still made it a good, successful birthday party. But in a week in which we are celebrating surprises on this podcast, that was a huge surprise. What I've since reflected on and when I tell this story in speeches, I go on to make this point. The reason that Charles and his wife didn't fill the pinata is because every pinata they'd ever hit in their lives up to that point had been stuffed with candy and toys. They simply didn't know from their own experience, which was only as kids, what you had to do as adults and so when it came for their first child, that first birthday party, they simply didn't have the knowledge or experience to do it right. Sometimes I've wondered aloud to audiences as I do to this week's audience, sometimes I wonder, do we think that's how life's going to work out with our finances.

Sometimes I worry that a lot of our fellow Americans, or even more so, humanity cast across the entire world, sometimes I worry that we don't realize it's really up to each of us to fill up our own pinata. Certainly, the purpose of our company, The Motley Fool to make the world smarter, happier, and richer, now in our 30th year from day 1, we've been saying it's about you. It's about the saving that you do. Once you've truly gotten out of debt, and I hope paid off all your credit card debts, most of all those double-digit interest rate debts, having that first dollar saved, net saved, invest it. Add more to it every two weeks, over the course of your first few years of investing, don't get to up or down if the market did really well or poorly because you're not playing the market for a quarter, I hope, or for a few years. I hope with me and all of us at the Motley Fool, you're making a lifetime commitment to being an investor, to saving and investing every two weeks with your salary check, maybe every quarter or so. If you lump it up and make investments a few times a year, you are in it to win it over the only term that counts, the long term. To return to the metaphor of surprise number of five, It's up to you, fellow Fool and me to fill up our own pinatas. Don't be the young parent who just realizes all along you didn't quite know how things work that earlier that you can clue into. This is not just true by the way of investing. It's also true of so many of our efforts and the time that we spend over the course of our lives. Make your dollar and your hours count. Help them lead you toward abundance. Use the power of compounding. 

Don't be Charles with my friend, Charles would be the first to say this to you, don't be Charles and his wife thinking it will be done for you because well, at least when you were a kid, it always was. What a wonderful, briefly sad, although that story had a happy and what a wonderful eye-opener for young parents to have that realization. But then for me selfishly to be able to leverage that story and make these points as I will continue to do so for many years in future. Surprised number 5, I guess the lesson is, well, I think I just tried to draw a few but not all surprises are good. If that party goes wrong, be flexible, have a Plan B. But most of all, realize one of the key lessons in life is we need to fill up our own pinatas. I have a lot of fun designing this new series. I hope you enjoyed it. A reminder, next week is your Rule Breaker Investing mailbag, our email addresses [email protected].

If you have questions or reactions to anything we've done this month on this podcast or even last month, or stories of your own of surprise, that you think would be of interest and inspiration to your fellow Fools, drop us a line. The email [email protected], you can always tweet us at RBI podcast on Twitter. Well, thanks again for joining me this week. We went from the Emerald City, to booking.com, to how do we play this game that I designed, to the 2004 Athens Olympics, closing it all out with a kid's birthday party. More than anything, I think surprise reminds us not to take anything for granted. Especially in dark times, not to get too down on our fortunes, or not to overrate or buildup in our minds to match the forces that countervail us often. They're a lot less imposing or threatening than we might have thought. Because sometimes it really is just smoke and mirrors. When it is, we're often ourselves responsible for generating some of that smoke or for not recognizing these are just mirrors. Have a surprisingly pleasant week. Fool-on.