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Hello, everyone, welcome to the Five Minutes podcast. This week I watched a documentary on Netflix that was very special for me as a project manager, and I want to share it with you. And it was suggested by a great friend, a musician called PJ, the bass player from one of the most popular bands in Brazil, called Jota Quest. And he said to me, Ricardo, I watched this documentary and it's exactly what you do for a living. And of course, when I watch it, I will not discuss here. And it's not my business to discuss the froud and discuss the misbehavior, the stealing and all. I would say the illegal aspects. So I will limit myself to talk about what key learnings I can take from that movie in a Project Management perspective. Let me give you a little bit of the context. Fyre Festival was supposed to be an ultra VIP festival in the Bahamas in a very exclusive island in the Bahamas that would join together celebrities, musicians, ultra wealthy people, beautiful people. And it was supposed to be, I would say, something really, really special in terms of music festival, and it was created by the owners of the Fire app, and his name is Billy McFarland. Something like that. And he created this, I would say, to promote the Fire app, and the Fire app was a celebrity booking app, an app that you can use to book a celebrity for I would say, your party or whatever you need.
Ok. And the Fyre Festival was, I would say, a way of promoting it with, I would say, free media and this kind of stuff and everything went wrong. Absolutely everything went wrong. So the festival was that I cannot even use the word fiasco because the word fiasco is too light for what happened. It was really something that I never saw. It's something that goes above and beyond failure. So the festival not only did not happen, but all the infrastructure was not ready and the guests arrived in absolutely mass. It was chaotic. Everything and people did not get paid. The workers did not get paid. Agencies did not get paid, so everything was a real mess. And what I learned, so I want to share with you three key learnings. The first one is motivation plus drive. They are excellent, but they are excellent only if you have your feet in the floor. It means that you cannot trust only Oh, I have motivation and motivation will build walls. No, it's not. Motivation is something that makes you work the extra mile. And what I can see from Billy, the CEO of Fire, is that he had very strong and powerful motivation and ability to bring other people around him.
And this is not bad, OK? However, he had no clue, absolutely no clue of what he was supposed to do. I know that maybe some of you listening to this will tell me that he has a clue and this was his project. The failure was his project, but I don't want to go into this route. But I want just to say that if you see someone overly motivated up to a point that they lose the connection with reality, this is a big red light. And this is very common. Another day I was giving a talk and I said that one of the biggest challenges startups and founders have is exactly this. At some point you become so passionate about your idea, your product, that you truly believe that nothing will stop you, that nothing will fail, that everything will be perfect, that you will be perfect, that everything will happen accordingly. And when you do that, you become blind and you lose your ability to see what is ahead. So what is the true aspect of motivation? Motivation is something that you have inside that helps you to walk and move forward, but it's not something to make you float and lose the notion of reality. The second and the second is about reality. Recognize reality as early as you can because reality will come if you know that something bad will happen to your project.
Don't wait for the disaster to happen as early as you can. You need to raise this flag. You need to share, and you need to recognize. If they notice that the festival would be a failure at the very early stages. There was no problem. They would say Oh. Fyre Festival was delayed to next year or the year after because of these X, Y and Z, and that's it, and then people will just move on and will return. The money will make some losses, of course, but what happened because they didn't recognize that and they were so blindfolded to see the reality that they put everything to lose just to let you know the owner is in jail, OK? The owner of the festival is in jail for fraud and several things. So reality sometimes reality is brutal and we don't want we think that magic things will happen, and I always think about the concept of entropy. I would say philosophical concept of entropy, OK? Things tend to get worse and not to get better. It's the natural process in the natural flow. We need to know that. And the third one is that you should understand system dynamics. Let's go back to the beginning of this podcast.
I said that the Fyre Festival was supposed to be a marketing engagement, of course, with profits and better marketing engagement to support the fire app. That was, I would say, I start up with VC funding and the Fire app was destroyed by the festival and several of the employees of the Fire app. And this is, I would say, probably one of the saddest parts of the documentary was close to the end when people working on the app, they had no clue of what was happening with the five festival. But then everything blew up. They not only lost their jobs, but they didn't get paid and they were demoralized. Everything so many times you need to understand that when you do things wrong in your project, you are not only destroying the project. When things go really bad, like this example, they can destroy your organization, they can destroy your community, they can create a damage that is a far, far bigger and far more complex than the scope of your project. So always think about this. Take a look. If you have not watched, this is not a new movie. Ok, I apologize for not doing this before, but it's a very interesting movie for you to watch in a Project Management perspective. I hope you enjoy this podcast and see you next week with another Five Minutes podcast.
