In three minutes Marco Rubio went from media darling to out of the race.
You don’t recover from flubbing your lines and the beating he got from Chris Christie.
When you are on the world stage you only get one shot.
Last week in New York, to set up a meeting with an incredibly busy person I told his assistant that if he didn’t think I delivered on my promise to share ideas that will transform the business, he could kick me out and never let me in again.
I think that’s a reasonable standard when you are using someone’s valuable time, and I accept that often you only get one chance to deliver.
Besides, if you fail in execution, really you have failed in preparation.
That’s where Rubio went wrong.
He has obviously done an inordinate amount of preparation for his campaign but he still blew it in execution.
First of all, he shouldn’t have picked a fight with a brawler like Christie, but that’s not where he failed.
It’s one thing to rehearse your favorite Obama-bashing lines when you are standing in front of the mirror feeling confident, but to master your preparation you must rehearse under battlefield conditions.
You see, when we feel threatened the most animalistic part of the brain, the so-called Reptilian complex, goes into fight or flight mode and we lose access to those higher brain functions that you need to say, not get crushed by Chris Christie.
This is the same problem that many people face in exam preparation, where the stress of sitting in the exam can block access to the answers they know and need.
Hence, to the greatest extent possible, to nail your preparation, you want to train yourself to perform optimally under stressful, real-world conditions.
For most things in life this level of preparation is unnecessary, but when it really counts, when you get your shot, you want to avoid blowing it like Rubio.