18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done (4 page)

Of course, if you do lose one, you’ll be okay because you’ve got the others.

It’s useful to question the basic assumptions you have about yourself. Even the ones as ingrained as
Who am I?
or, perhaps more accurately,
Who are we?
Because, most likely, you’ll find all sorts of people living in you—people you never fully appreciated were there. And those under-appreciated aspects of yourself may turn out to be the keys to focusing on the right things—and getting them done. Seeing yourself fully, broadly, and clearly is crucial.

And if you still believe that doing nothing but work is necessary to support your lifestyle, then it’s worth looking at ways to moderate your lifestyle so you don’t kill yourself trying to maintain it.

Walk away from the email and have dinner with your family. Leave work at a decent hour and play tennis with a friend. Choose rituals that have meaning to you and do them religiously. Most important, be consistent—doing the same thing repeatedly over time solidifies your identity.

A good friend of mine lost her job about a year ago, and I called at the time to see if I could do anything. My intention was to help her find a new job as soon as possible; I knew money was tight.

I was pleasantly surprised, though. She told me she had decided to postpone her job search for a few months. She was pregnant and wanted to focus on that for a while. Once she felt ready, she would look for work. She was too busy creating an identity as a mother to get caught up in her identity as a worker.

Eventually I received an email from her telling me she was back at work. “I love the job,” she told me. “It’s a great balance to motherhood.”

S
usan Boyle, who performed on the U.K. television show
Britain’s Got Talent
, captured the world’s attention.

In case you missed it, she was a forty-seven-year-old unemployed charity worker who lived with her cat in a small village in Scotland.

As soon as she walked on stage, the audience began to snicker and roll their eyes. Simon Cowell, the show’s host, asked her some pre-performance questions in his famously condescending style, and to the audience’s enjoyment she answered awkwardly.

She was painfully ordinary, and everyone was prepared, looking forward even, to see her fail.

By now, if you don’t know the story, you can guess it, right? She more than wowed them. She opened her mouth to sing, and, as judge Piers Morgan later said, she had “the voice of an angel.”

She wasn’t painfully ordinary; she was amazingly
extraordinary. The audience immediately jumped to a standing ovation and stayed there until the end of the song. A week after she performed, the YouTube video of Susan’s performance had received more than thirty-five million views.

We were riveted, and an article in
USA Today
did a good job of cataloging all the reasons. We prejudged her by her looks and were fooled. We experienced the gamut of emotions in a few short moments: guilt, shame, vindication, hope. She’s a modern-day Cinderella, and these days, it’s a wonderful distraction and inspiration to witness the triumph of the human spirit.

But there’s something else Susan Boyle awakens in us as we watch her come out of her shell: our own selves. Who among us does not move through life with the hidden sense, maybe even quiet desperation, that we are destined for more? That underneath our ordinary exterior lies an extraordinary soul? That given the right opportunity, the right stage, the right audience, we would shine as the stars we truly are?

That promise underlies most successful advertising campaigns: the desire to transform from caterpillar to butterfly. Maybe if you buy that [fill in the blank], people will see you for the sophisticated, cool, gorgeous, talented, lovable person you know you really are.

But in our less desperate moments, we know we can’t purchase that transformation. Although Susan Boyle became an overnight sensation, hers was not an overnight transformation. She’s been practicing singing since she was twelve. In her case, overnight was thirty-five years.

It’s easy to admire Susan. But it’s far more interesting to be transformed by her. “There is grace,” a friend once wrote to me, “in being molded by your own gifts.”

To allow yourself to be molded by your own gifts takes courage. You have to be willing to stand there, exposed and authentic, while the audience rolls their eyes at you and sneers, expecting failure. And then, of course, you have to fail, laugh or cry, and keep going until, one day, they stop laughing and start clapping.

But you can’t do it alone. Susan Boyle didn’t; she had a voice coach, Fred O’Neil, who worked with her for years and encouraged her to audition. And she had her mother.

“She was the one who said I should enter
Britain’s Got Talent
. We used to watch it together,” Boyle told the British paper
The Times
of her mother, who died in 2007. “She thought I would win…. I am doing it as a tribute to my mum, and I think she would be very proud.”

If we’re lucky, we have parents who encourage us. Nothing really replaces a mother or father who believes in you. But even if you don’t have parents who believe in you, it’s important to have someone. Someone you trust enough that when they offer criticism, you know it’s to draw you out more fully, not shut you down even partially.

And a good supporting friend even sees through the talent, right through to you. With her mother gone, Boyle still has O’Neil. As he said to
The Telegraph
, he was worried all this attention was obscuring “the real person” he knew.

“I am concerned about her being surrounded by all
these PR people,” he said, “that she will not be given the time to sing.”

Susan Boyle is a phenomenal role model for all of us, not just because of her talent or her courage or her perseverance or her supportive friends. She is a phenomenal role model for us because she is us, in all our awkward ordinariness and amazing extraordinariness.

S
everal years ago, I took on a new client in New York City. This company had lawsuits against it, high turnover, and terrible press. One of the first people I met was Hunter, a senior leader.

“Look, Peter, you seem like a nice guy,” Hunter said with a smile as he looked at me from across his desk, “but there have been several consultants before you and there will be several more after you. If you think you’re going to change the way we do things here, well, you’re mistaken.”

Hunter smiled at me again, and I had a strong, visceral reaction—I immediately disliked him.

After leaving the meeting, I called my uncle, a successful businessman in London, and told him the story. “I can’t work with this company.”

“Why not?” my uncle asked.

“Honestly? I really don’t like the guy,” I answered.

He laughed. “You don’t have to like him, Peter. You just have to do business with him.”

My uncle was right. And he was pointing out a habit that costs many of us tremendous opportunity. Our reaction to an event creates an unproductive outcome.

event → reaction →
outcome

In my case, the
event
was that Hunter told me I wouldn’t be effective. My
reaction
was to dislike Hunter and avoid working with him. The
outcome
would have been the loss of that client.

This simple event-reaction-outcome chain governs most of our spontaneous action. Something or someone hooks us and we react. Someone yells at us, we yell back and create the outcome of a damaged relationship. It’s not that we
want
a damaged relationship; it’s just what
happens
when we yell back.

And that’s the problem. The most important part of the chain, arguably the only part that really matters, the
outcome
, is collateral damage from our reaction. It’s not intentional. We’re reacting to the
event
. The
outcome
is simply fallout.

But this time, before making that mistake, I paused, which gave my rational self time to negotiate with my emotional self. And luckily for me, during that negotiation, they must have agreed to call my uncle for advice.

My uncle offered an alternative chain. Focus on the outcome, then choose your reaction.

event →
outcome
→ reaction

Rather than focus on my personal reaction to Hunter, my uncle suggested that I focus on what I wanted, which was to grow the business.

When an unsettling event occurs, pause before reacting. In that pause, ask yourself a single question:
What is the outcome
I
want?
Then, instead of reacting to the
event
, react to the
outcome
.

In other words, stop reacting to the past and start reacting to the future.

If someone yells at you, pause before yelling back. Then ask yourself what outcome you want. If the answer is “An improved relationship,” don’t yell back. Instead, in a normal voice, empathize with their anger and ask some questions about the concerns raised in the midst of the screaming. That’s a reaction that will achieve a better relationship.

Here’s the hard part: You react to the event because it’s asking you to react to it. But just because the event
catalyzed
your action doesn’t mean it should
determine
it. How you react can and should be determined by the outcome—by the future you want to create.

Maybe a colleague comes to you complaining about a situation she’s in with her boss (event). How should you respond (reaction)? If the outcome you want is for her to feel supported, then listen with empathy. If you want to help her, then offer solutions. If you simply want to get back to work, then find a graceful escape.

This is particularly useful in personal relationships.
When a problem is presented to me (event), my instinct is to solve it (reaction). On the other hand, what I want most with my wife, Eleanor, is a strong vibrant relationship (outcome). So when she comes to me with a problem, instead of immediately trying to solve it, I ask her what she wants me to do. Listen? Solve? Coach? I am surprised, disappointed even, by the number of times she says, “Just listen.”
Wait
, I want to tell her,
I have ideas. Solutions! I can help.
But after more than ten years of marriage, I’ve realized that listening is sometimes all the help she wants from me. So I listen.

In the end, I continued to work with Hunter and his company for several years. Instead of focusing on Hunter, I focused on the goal of creating a more functional, productive management process for the company.

At one point, I was back in Hunter’s office, planning an offsite I was going to lead for him, when I saw my book on his bookshelf.

“Have you read it?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered, “and it’s not bad.”

You know
, I thought,
I might like this guy after all
.

Not that it matters.