18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done (5 page)

I
was on my way to Princeton University, where I was a student more than twenty years ago, to give a speech about life after college. As I traveled to the campus, I remembered a single question that haunted my last few months of schooling:
Now what?

I had no good answer. I didn’t have a job. I didn’t have a plan.

Which, as it turns out, might have been a pretty good plan after all.

Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates were computer science students without any real plan. They started Facebook because it was fun, used their talents, and was a novel way for Harvard students and alumni to stay in touch. Zuckerberg never anticipated it would host more than four hundred million members. And he had no clear idea where the money would come from. But he kept at it
until, in 2007, Facebook let outside developers create applications for it, and game developers started buying ads on Facebook to keep attracting players. Hardly Zuckerberg’s strategy in 2004.

Similarly, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google, started writing code in 1996, they had no clear plan or idea how they would make money. But that didn’t stop them from starting. It wasn’t until 2002 and 2003 that AdWords and AdSense became the company’s moneymaking platform.

In a few chapters, I’ll address the importance of staying flexible and the dangers of sticking too closely to your plan. But what if you have no plan?

That’s the situation so many of us face—not just when we graduate but throughout our lives. Even those who grew up in the generation that stayed with a company thirty years are now, thankfully, living long enough to have second and third careers. And the younger generation is switching jobs every few years, often changing careers entirely. My yoga teacher used to be a casting director. Yesterday’s plan may not apply today.

The limitless options we encounter make it difficult to create a plan. In a study led by Sheena Iyengar, a management professor at Columbia University Business School, one group of people was presented with samples of six different jams available for purchase while another group was presented with twenty-four different jams. The twenty-four-jam group showed much greater interest when sampling, but the six-jam group was ten times more likely to
actually purchase a jam. We’re ten times more likely to take action when choice is limited!

It’s easy to become paralyzed when so many choices exist. We can’t decide among them so we end up not choosing.

But life goes on, and no choice becomes the de facto choice, and suddenly we look back and feel like our talents have been wasted. We leave the store without buying any jam at all.

We need a way to get started
now
, to move in the right direction, even when we don’t have a plan.

So what makes people like Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin so successful? Some of it is opportunity. Some of it is persistence. And some is sheer luck. But there’s another set of ingredients that encourages opportunity, persistence, and luck. I call them the four elements. The four behaviors around which you should shape your next year:

Zuckerberg, Page, and Brin loved technology and were great with it. None of them operated alone—they partnered with people to complement their weaknesses. And in style as well as substance, they offered unique approaches that differentiated them and their companies from anything else out there.

For me, at Princeton, it was outdoor leadership. My strength was group dynamics. My weakness—a neurotic safety consciousness—was an asset in this situation. I loved being with others in the outdoors. And having grown up in New York City, my urban outlook brought a unique perspective to teaching people who were also new to the outdoors.

Still, I had no idea how I was supposed to turn any of that into gainful employment. I couldn’t see how it would provide a career for me in the long term. I couldn’t see raising a family while living in the woods. It was far from perfect. So I almost threw it all out. I almost went to law school.

But I didn’t. Instead, I chose to stick with what I was doing, experimenting to improve my focus on the four elements while changing those things that detracted from them.

One thing I experimented with was doing outdoor team building with corporate groups. I could do that while living a more stable life. And it leveraged my differences even more—I knew more about the corporate world than most others in outdoor leadership.

So I started a company. One decision led to another. Eighteen years later, I’m still changing my business, morphing it to take better advantage of my strengths, weaknesses, differences, and passions. What will it look like in three years? I’m not sure.

The entire path need not be clear. Most successful people and businesses have meandered their way to success
by exercising their talents in ways they never would have imagined at the outset.

Here’s what’s fortunate: You’re already doing something—whether it’s a job, a hobby, or an occasional recreational pastime—that exploits your strengths, allows for your weaknesses, uses your differences, and excites your passion. All you have to do is notice it.

The speech I gave when I arrived at Princeton? The guidance I could offer the students who were worrying about their futures? Forget about your future. For just a moment, stop fixating on where you want to go. Instead, focus on where you are. Spend some time understanding
who
you are. And start from there.

H
ow can a few pirates in small boats capture and hold huge tanker ships hostage? How can a few scattered people in caves halfway across the world instill fear in the hearts of millions of citizens in the largest, most powerful countries in the world? How can a single independent contractor beat out a thirty-thousand-person consulting firm to win a multimillion-dollar contract?

In
A Separate Peace
, John Knowles’s coming-of-age novel, Phineas invents the game Blitzball, in which everyone chases a single ball carrier, who must outrun every other competitor. As it happens, Phineas always wins because the rules of the game—a game he invented—favor his particular skills.

That’s the secret of the successful underdog. Play the game you know you can win, even if it means inventing it yourself.

Entrepreneurs intuitively understand this; they start
their own companies for exactly this reason. I know a tremendous number of extremely successful people who could never get a job in a corporation because they never went to college. So they started their own companies: companies they designed to play to their unique strengths. They invented a game they could win, and then they played it.

In his book
Moneyball
, Michael Lewis explains how the Oakland A’s, with $41 million in salaries, consistently beat teams with more than $100 million in salaries. The richer teams hired the top players based on the traditional criteria: the highest batting averages, most bases stolen, most hits that brought a runner home, and—get this—the all-American look.

Other poorer teams who used the same criteria as the rich ones had to settle for second- or third-tier people who were less expensive. Which basically guaranteed that the richest teams had the best players and won.

But the Oakland A’s studied the game and reinvented the rules. They realized that the number of times a player got on a base (on-base percentage) combined with the number of bases a player got each time he came to bat (slugging percentage) was a better predictor of success. And since no other teams were looking at those particular criteria, the players who excelled in those areas were relatively cheap to sign. Hiring those people was a game the Oakland A’s could win.

Large consulting firms spend tens of thousands of dollars on glossy proposals to clients. But is that what wins
the game? Perhaps what really wins is client ownership over the project, and if you sit with the client and design the project with her, your one-page proposal (that she, in effect, co-wrote with you) will beat their hundred pages every time—at a fraction of the cost. That’s a game an independent contractor can win.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his
New Yorker
article “How David Beats Goliath,” talks about the moment that David shed his armor. He knew he couldn’t win a game of strength against strength. But he also knew he was faster, more agile, and had better aim. So he picked up five stones, dashed out of the pack, and won the battle. He broke the rules and reinvented the game.

Gladwell refers to research done by the political scientist Ivan Arreguin-Toft, who looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years in which one side was at least
ten times stronger
than the other. He found that the weaker side won almost 30 percent of the time—a remarkable feat. The reason? They fought a different war than their opponents.

The 70 percent that lost? They fought the conventional way; they engaged in battle using the same rules as their stronger opponents.

In 1981, Doug Lenat, a computer scientist, entered a war game tournament in which each contestant was given a fictional trillion-dollar budget to spend on a naval fleet of their choosing. The other contenders had deep military backgrounds and built a conventional naval fleet with boats of various sizes with strong defenses.

But Lenat had no military background. He simply fed the rules of the tournament to a computer program he invented: a program that was built to win, not to follow convention.

“The program came up with a strategy of spending the trillion dollars on an astronomical number of small ships like P.T. boats, with powerful weapons but absolutely no defense and no mobility,” Lenat said. “They just sat there. Basically if they were hit once, they would sink. And what happened is that the enemy would take its shots and every one of those shots would sink our ships. But it didn’t matter, because we had so many.”

Lenat won the game in a landslide.

What game are you playing? Is it the right game for your particular skills and talents? Is it a perfect setup for you or your company to win? If not, then perhaps it’s time to play a different game or invent one of your own: one you can win.

I
was having lunch with a friend of mine, Geoff, a man who has been very successful in business. Deeply generous, he gave away the majority of his fortune, hundreds of millions of dollars, to a foundation.

When the waiter came to take our order, Geoff asked for the Caesar salad with shrimp and then added, “But instead of shrimp, could you put salmon on the salad?”

“That’s no problem, sir,” the waiter responded. “Just so you know, though, it’ll be an extra dollar.”

“You know,” Geoff replied after a moment’s hesitation, “forget it. I’ll just take the shrimp.”

What do you call that? Cheap? Strange? Dysfunctional? I call it the secret to his success. Not yours, by the way. His.

Geoff has a fixation on value. He can’t stand the idea of spending a single extra dollar if it doesn’t provide at least two dollars of value. Maybe that’s extreme. But so is
a fortune (and foundation) of hundreds of millions of dollars. He’s not successful
despite
his quirk; he’s successful
because
of it.

And what’s made Geoff successful is that he’s not embarrassed about it. Or ashamed. He doesn’t hide or repress or deny it.

He uses it.

I was talking to a famous guy I know—someone whose name you would instantly recognize—when he started name-dropping.
Hold on,
I thought,
you don’t have to name-drop to me. I’m already impressed. In fact, you’re the name I use when I’m name-dropping.

Why was my famous friend name-dropping? Because after everything he’s achieved, he’s still insecure. Which is, at least in part, why he’s achieved so much. He never would have worked so hard, spent so much time and effort on his projects, continued to apply himself after he had “made it,” if he weren’t insecure. His dysfunction has turned out to be tremendously functional.

“The most interesting novels,”
Newsweek
editor Malcolm Jones wrote in a recent book review, “are the ones where the flaws and virtues can’t be pulled apart.”

That’s even truer for people. The most powerful ones don’t conquer their dysfunctions, quirks, and potentially embarrassing insecurities. They seamlessly integrate them to make an impact in the world.

Another man I know was the driving force behind health reforms that saved the lives of millions of people in the
developing world. Literally millions. Certainly he achieved this feat with great strengths. He was deeply connected with his values. He worked tirelessly and with single-minded focus. He cared deeply about others, friends and strangers alike, and did whatever he could to help them.

But he had a quirk. He lived and worked in the hyper-intellectual world of academia, where nuance is valued far above simplicity. Success as an academic traditionally lies in one’s ability to see and expound the gray.

But he never saw the gray. He saw the world in black and white, right and wrong. This simplistic view of the world is something that people in academia try to hide or overcome all the time. But he never hid his simplicity. He embraced it. And that was the source of his power, the secret ingredient that enabled him to save so many lives. He cut through the morass of a debate and arrived at the simplicity of righteous action.