18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done (6 page)

Yet another friend, an outstanding investment manager, spends all his time obsessively looking at, thinking about, and reading financial statements of companies in which he is considering investing. He lives and breathes them. I once invited him to spend the weekend skiing. Instead of skis, he brought a stack of annual reports that stood three feet high. That’s just weird. But his obsession has made him one of the best stock pickers in the world.

We all have quirks and obsessions like these. Maybe we don’t admit them, even to ourselves. Or we worry that they detract from our success and work hard to train ourselves out of them.

But that’s a mistake. Our quirks very well may be the secret to our power.

I
was running along the six-mile loop in Central Park on a cold winter day when I passed the southernmost end of the park and noticed a large number of miserable-looking pedicab drivers huddled together to keep warm. Periodically, one reached out to a passing pedestrian, but no one seemed to want a ride in a bicycle-drawn carriage. It was too cold.

And then, to my surprise, a little farther along the run I saw a pedicab—with passengers in it—circling the park. The reason this pedicab had been hired instead of the others was immediately obvious. On both sides of his small carriage hung signs with large letters that read
HEATED
SEATS
.

In any highly competitive field—and these days every field is highly competitive—being different is the only way to win. Nobody wants to sell a commodity, and nobody wants to be a commodity.

Yet even though we all know that, most of us spend a tremendous amount of effort trying
not
to be different. We model ourselves and our businesses after other successful people and businesses, spending considerable money and energy discovering and replicating best practices, looking for that one recipe for success.

Here’s the thing: If you look like other people, and if your business looks like other businesses, then all you’ve done is increase your pool of competition.

I was consulting with American Express in 1993 when Harvey Golub became the new CEO. He wore suspenders. Within a few weeks, so did everyone else. In our corporate cultures, we school, like fish. We try especially hard to fit in when we worry about getting laid off. Maybe, we think, standing out will remind them that we’re here, and then they’ll lay us off, too.

But fitting in has the opposite effect. It makes you dispensable. If you’re like everyone else, then how critical to the business can you be?

That’s how my friend Paul Faerstein lost his job. He was very successful at fitting in. It was the early 1990s and he was a partner at the Hay Group. He was a good consultant—I learned a lot from him—and for a long time he acted like the other partners. He sold the projects they sold. Billed the hours they billed.

Then, in a year and a half, Paul’s mother died, his brother died, and he got divorced. He couldn’t keep up his sales or his billable hours. And here’s the important part: He didn’t bring anything unique to the table beyond those
things. It wasn’t that he couldn’t, as we’ll see in a moment. But he didn’t. So he lost his job.

Trying to distinguish ourselves by being the same as others, only better, is hard to do and even harder to sustain. There are too many smart, hardworking people out there all trying to excel by being the best at what everyone else is doing.

It’s simply easier to be different.

Entertainment is a great example. In a field with a tremendous number of beautiful, sexy, talented people, what are the chances that you’ll be noticed by being even more beautiful, sexy, and talented? But Susan Boyle was different. She broke the mold. Which is why her YouTube videos received
more than one hundred million hits
. If she looked like every other aspiring singer, would the world have noticed?

If you’re seventy, don’t get a face-lift and pretend to be thirty. Embrace seventy and use it to your advantage. According to a tremendous body of research, talent is not inborn, it’s created by practice. Which gives a seventy-year-old a tremendous advantage over a thirty-year-old.

But even in our diversity-focused corporations, it’s hard to be different because we have cultural norms that encourage sameness. That’s why we have dress codes. And expressions like “Don’t rock the boat.” My advice? Rock on.

That’s what Paul eventually did. After he lost his job, Paul realized that he was never fully himself as a partner in the Hay Group. He had more to offer. He wanted to
connect more deeply with his clients, help them achieve things outside the scope of the Hay Group’s offerings, and engage with them on issues beyond the bottom line.

Now his name is Paramacharya Swami Parameshwarananda (you can call him Swamiji for short). He is the resident spiritual master at an ashram in Colorado. His change might seem drastic, but it was easy for him because each step he took was a step toward himself. And now he couldn’t be happier or more effective. He serves on various boards and leadership councils and is a driving force behind several educational and humanitarian projects around the world.

He’s still doing many of the same things he did as a failed consultant in New Jersey, but he’s more successful because he feels and acts like himself. In his words, “I’m living my inner truth.” And he is indispensable. Not simply for what he does, but for who he is.

Now, I’m not suggesting you go live in an ashram in Colorado. For most people that would be absurd. And copying someone else who’s different won’t help. You’ll never be as good a version of someone else as you are of yourself.

How can you move closer to contributing your unique value? What are your “heated seats”? Can you be more effective by being more yourself?

Face it: You’re different. And the sooner you appreciate it, the sooner you embrace and assert it, the more successful you’ll be. The same goes for your business.

That’s why one pedicab driver with heated seats can
stay busy all day while the others huddle around, fareless, trying to stay warm.

C
aptain Greg Davis is an outstanding fishing guide. I went out with him early one morning off the coast of Savannah, Georgia, and came back a few hours later with several fish so big that I needed help just holding them up. Most other guides came back that morning with nothing.

What makes Greg such a remarkable guide? If you were hiring guides, could you predict he would be a star?

Wouldn’t it be great if we could predict the areas where we would be most likely to shine? Where we would be stars? What if we could predict which song we should sing—and on which stage—to truly reveal our inner Susan Boyle? Well, we can.

On January 15, 2009, Captain C. B. Sullenberger made an emergency landing of his fifty-ton passenger aircraft, softly gliding it onto the Hudson River in New York City, saving the lives of all 155 people on board. Miraculous? Or predictable?

What do we know about Captain Sullenberger? Before the landing that exposed his particular brilliance, could you have predicted he would have the skill, the presence, the leadership to become the star that he is today?

Earlier in my career, I spent four years working in a management consulting company creating models to use in hiring people. Our clients, mostly large, public companies, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on research we performed in their companies to predict who would be a star performer.

Here was our process: We interviewed both star and average performers in a client company and identified the characteristics that distinguished the stars from the rest. Then we helped the company interview people and hire the ones who fit the model.

Sounds reasonable. But it’s not. It’s tremendously expensive and time consuming. It requires intensive interviews that demand a great deal of skill; it’s only as effective as the person doing the interviewing and hiring. And even if you have the money, time, and skill, you end up hiring past stars, not future ones.

Some would argue that the only thing that predicts success in a job is actual success in that job. That’s why financial services firms hire close to ten times the number of analysts they need and then, a year or two later, keep the ones who succeed and let the others go. Of course, that’s even more expensive and time consuming than our modeling process.

There is a much cheaper, easier way to place a person—you or anyone—in a position to succeed. Ask one question:

What do you do in your spare time?

In Captain Sullenberger’s case, the first clue that he would become Captain Sullenberger the hero is that, in his teens, when most of his friends were getting their driver’s licenses, he got his pilot’s license. What did he do for fun? He flew glider planes, which is basically what he did when he landed in the Hudson River with no engines. Extracurricular activities? He was an accident investigator for the Air Line Pilots Association and worked with federal aviation officials to improve training and methods for evacuating aircraft in emergencies.

As a boy, he built model aircraft carriers with tiny planes on them, careful to paint every last piece. Perhaps that attention to detail explains why he walked through the cabin twice, making sure no one was left behind before he escaped the sinking plane himself.

But here’s the thing: Given his personality, it is unlikely that you would have discovered any of this without asking directly about it. When Michael Balboni, New York State’s deputy secretary for public safety, thanked him for a job done brilliantly, he responded in the most unaffected, humble way, “That’s what we’re trained to do.”

Even if you had learned about all of Captain Sullenberger’s activities, you might have considered his obsession dysfunctional. Wouldn’t you rather hire someone well
rounded? Someone who has interests beyond the particular? Someone who might be a better communicator?

But people are often successful not despite their dysfunctions but because of them. Obsessions are one of the greatest telltale signs of success. Understand your obsessions and you will understand your natural motivation—the thing for which you would walk to the end of the earth.

Greg Davis, my friend the fishing guide, is on the water fishing with clients six days a week. Can you guess what he does on his one day off?

M
any years ago, when I first started my consulting firm, a friend of mine, Elaine, who worked for a large company, suggested I speak with her colleague Colin, who might be in a position to hire Bregman Partners.

So I called Colin, mentioned Elaine, and asked to meet with him. “I’m very busy,” Colin told me. “Let’s just talk on the phone.”

But I knew the phone wouldn’t cut it. “How about lunch?” I asked him. “Or a drink after work? Or maybe just fifteen minutes in person somewhere?”

Colin finally agreed to a short lunch. Then he canceled. We rescheduled. He canceled again. We rescheduled again. He canceled again. It was clear that he didn’t want to meet with me. I almost gave up.

Here’s what I realized, though: If I could avoid reacting to my feelings of frustration or hurt, then the cost to
me of rescheduling the meeting was a two-minute phone call with Colin’s secretary. And the upside was potentially enormous.

So I kept rescheduling until, one day, several months later, Colin didn’t cancel and we had lunch. It was very quick, of course, but long enough for me to ask him to let me submit a proposal. A couple of weeks after I sent it to him, he left me a short message explaining that I had missed the mark but he’d keep me in mind. Right.

I felt affronted. All that work I put in and all I got in return was a voice mail? Again, I almost walked away.

But instead, I called and asked for another lunch to understand what I misunderstood. He declined but suggested I speak with his colleague Lily, who was in a different department and might have a need for my services.

So I set up a meeting with Lily. Who canceled. As I prepared to reschedule, I noticed something unexpected: I started to enjoy the process of trying to get in, the challenge of making the sale. It became a game to me, and my goal was to keep playing until, at some point, I’d say the right thing to the right person and get my foot in the door. I was, surprisingly, having fun.

And I was getting good at it. Scheduling. Rescheduling. Finding a way to keep the conversation going. You’d think it wouldn’t be something hard or useful to become good at, but you’d be wrong on both counts.

Most of our jobs hinge on repetition. That’s how we become good at anything. The problem is that we give
up too soon because anything we do repetitively becomes boring.

Unless, that is, we have a peculiar taste for the task; unless it captures our interest. For some reason that maybe we don’t even understand—and we don’t have to—we enjoy it.

That’s how I learned how to do a handstand. It always seemed completely out of reach for me. But then someone told me they learned as an adult. So I figured I could learn, too. It took six months, but now I can, somewhat reliably, stand on my hands.

Which has led me to believe that anyone can do anything. As long as three conditions exist: