18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done (7 page)

We often think we need only the first two, but it’s the third condition that’s most important. The trying is the day-to-day reality. And trying to achieve something is very different from achieving it. It’s the opposite, actually. It’s not achieving it.

If you want to be a great marketer, you need to spend years being a clumsy one. Want to be a great manager? Then you’d better enjoy being a poor one long enough to become a good one. Because that practice is what it’s going to take to eventually become a great one.

In his book
Outliers
, Malcolm Gladwell discusses research
done at the Berlin Academy of Music. Researchers divided violin students into three categories: the stars, the good performers, and the ones who would become teachers but not performers. It turns out that the number one predictor of which category a violinist fell into was the number of hours of practice.

The future teachers had practiced four thousand hours in their lifetime. The good performers, eight thousand hours. And those who were categorized as stars? Every single one of them had practiced at least ten thousand hours.

And here’s the compelling part: There wasn’t a single violinist who had practiced ten thousand hours who wasn’t a star. In other words, ten thousand hours of practice guaranteed you’d be a star violinist. According to Gladwell, ten thousand hours of practice is the magic number to become the best at anything.

Which is why you’d better enjoy
trying
to achieve your goals. Because you’ll never spend ten thousand hours doing anything you don’t enjoy. And if you don’t enjoy the trying part, you’ll never do it long enough to reach your goal.

Eventually, after five or six canceled meetings, Lily and I met for lunch. Which, as it turned out, was perfect timing. When we finally met, she had a real need, which hadn’t existed when we’d first started scheduling a meeting.

By this time, I was familiar to her and the company even though I had never done any work for them. I had been around for months and they trusted me because I followed through on every commitment I made to them.

That year, I signed a large contract with Lily’s company. Twelve years later, they’re still a big client of Bregman Partners. And they still cancel lots of meetings.

D
o you know anyone who tried for years to have a baby but couldn’t? Then, after giving up, maybe after adopting, suddenly, surprisingly, got pregnant?

Or someone who was dying to be in a relationship? Dated all the time, but never met the right person. Then, after accepting he would be alone, started focusing on other things and, lo and behold, met someone and got married?

How about someone who lost her job? Maybe she spent the next year working on her résumé, perusing job sites, devoting all her energy to getting work. All to no avail. Then, after deciding to stop looking so hard, out of the blue came a great job offer?

What is that? A karmic journey? A miracle? Statistical aberration? Pure random chance? Perhaps it never really happens; perhaps we remember those stories precisely because they are so unusual.

Or perhaps, it’s a really great strategy.

I heard a story from a friend of mine. She knows a guy who’s been out of work for more than a year. He’s spent the year working on his résumé and sending it out. He’s on Internet job sites every day. He tries to meet with people when there’s the opportunity, but there aren’t a lot of opportunities. And he’s getting more and more depressed. It’s hard to get out of bed, but he does. He puts on a suit and tie, sits at his computer, and looks. Eventually, he figures, he’ll find a job. I’m sure he’s right.

But probably no time soon. Who wants to hire someone who’s depressed?

I do think there’s another way to go through life with less pain and more success. A way to spend your year—of doing work and living your life—that’s a pleasure and a great match for you and your talents.

Give up.

Not completely. But mostly. Just stop trying so hard. Here’s my recipe:

A good friend of mine got involved in a church she adores. She loves all the pastors; she came to our house for dinner the other day and couldn’t stop talking about them. So she met with them and offered to help in whatever way they needed. She’s now leading a monthly strategy breakfast with the pastors and lay leaders of the church. I’ve never seen her so excited.

Another friend is training for a triathlon with a group of fifteen others. He’s in the best shape of his life and can’t stop talking about it.

A company I know is doing pro bono work for charities and the government. Everyone working on those projects is energized.

Another company I know has given all their people writing time; they’ve been told to put their ideas on paper and get them out there. Somewhere. Anywhere.

Why does this work? Woody Allen once said that
80 percent of success is just showing up. When I first started my business, a great mentor of mine told me to join the boards of not-for-profits and do what I do best for them. Other board members will then see the results and want to hire my company to do the same for them and their companies. That’s the obvious reason.

Here’s the more subtle reason this works: People want to hire energized people who are passionate and excited about what they’re doing. Jobs come from being engaged in the world and building human connections.

And an even more subtle reason: If you’re passionate about what you’re doing, and you’re doing it with other people who are passionate about what they’re doing, then chances are the work you eventually end up doing for your livelihood—if you’re not already doing it—will be more in line with the stuff you love to do. And then… then your life changes (not to be too dramatic, but it’s true). You’re doing work you love, at which you excel, with people you enjoy. You can’t help but succeed.

Now, I know what you might be thinking: That’s a fine strategy if you’re independently wealthy, getting that nice fat trust fund check every week to pay for your gym membership (or mortgage, or kid’s tuition). But what about the rest of us? We can’t just quit jobs we’re ill-suited for if they pay the bills. Our inability to pay the monthly bills might actually intrude on our ability to “enjoy” unemployment.

That’s true. But not an excuse not to start. Because your best bet at succeeding, whether you’re looking for a job or already in one, is to throw yourself into things you adore.
Work that doesn’t feel like work because it’s
easy.
Because you naturally shine when you’re doing it.

If you don’t have a job, then your hardest job is to manage your fear. Because here’s the kicker: It won’t take longer to find a job even though you’re spending less time looking. It’ll take you less time.

Pursuing things you love doing with people you enjoy will better position you to get a job—and much better position you to get a job at the intersection of the four elements. Other people will notice your commitment, passion, skill, and personality, and they’ll want to either hire you or help you get hired.

Also, actively pursuing other activities while looking for a job will make you more qualified for a job—because you’ll end up a more interesting person. When you finally get that job interview, you’ll be able to recount all the many things you’ve been doing (and will probably have a good time relating them) instead of saying that the only thing you’ve been doing for the past three years is looking (unsuccessfully so far) for a job.

I just heard the story of a woman who decided to do work she didn’t enjoy for a few years in order to make a lot of money. Three years later, the company went bankrupt. That could happen to anyone. Bad luck. But here’s what she said that I found the most depressing: “It’s as though I didn’t work for the last three years—it’s all gone. And what’s worse, I worked like a dog and hated it. I just wasted three years of my life.”

Don’t waste your time, your year. Spend it in a way
that excites you. That teaches you new things. That introduces you to new people who see you at your natural, most excited, most powerful best. Use and develop your strengths. Use and even develop your weaknesses. Express your differences. And pursue the things you love.

There’s no better way to spend your year.

I
was lying in bed, reading a magazine, when the fear arose. It started somewhere between my stomach and my chest, and it radiated outward. Like adrenaline coursing through my body after a sudden fright, it was a physical sensation, but it felt slower, deeper, wider, as it radiated to the tops of my arms and legs. It felt hot. I started to sweat. My body felt weak.

I put down the magazine and lay with my head on the pillow as I thought about death.

My mother-in-law was diagnosed with cancer; she died after a decades-long battle with the disease. A few months after her death, I received a call from a friend of mine, in her forties, who one morning found a lump in her breast and a few days later had a mastectomy. A few days after that, a friend told me his business partner came home from vacation feeling a little under the weather; within a week he was dead from an aggressive cancer he never knew he
had. That was right after he told me that his father-in-law was recently killed crossing the street.

And here I was now, reading an article by Atul Gawande about rethinking end-of-life medical treatment. Gawande isn’t just insightful as he explores what doctors should do when they can’t save your life, he’s also vivid. The first line of his article reads: “Sara Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her doctors learned that she was going to die.”

I am, as far as I know, thank God, healthy. But it was somewhere in the middle of that article that it suddenly hit me—not just intellectually, but physically and emotionally:
I am going to die
.

Each year, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics conducts an American Time Use Survey, asking thousands of Americans to document how they spend every minute of every day.

According to the data, most of us spend a total of almost 20 hours of each day sleeping (8.68 hours/day), working (7.78 hours/day), and watching television (3.45 hours/day). I know: Shocking, right? I mean, who sleeps that much?

It’s hard to look at the data and not think about where you fit in. Do you watch more or less television? Do you work longer or shorter hours? It’s a useful and interesting exercise to examine how we spend each minute of the day. To know where we’re devoting our wisdom, our action, our life’s energy.

And yet
where
we spend our time tells us only so much.
More important, and completely subjective, is what those activities
mean
to us.

I recently happened upon a short article, “Top Five Regrets of the Dying” by Bronnie Ware, who spent many years nursing people who had gone home to die. Their most common regret? “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” Their second most common? “I wish I didn’t work so hard.”

There are two ways to address these regrets. One, work less hard and spend your time living a life true to yourself. Or two, work just as hard—harder even—on things that matter to you. On things that represent a life lived true to you. Something you consider to be important. Meaningful.

Because if you put those two regrets together, you realize that what people really regret isn’t simply working so hard, it’s working so hard on things that simply don’t matter to them. If our work feels like it matters to us, if it represents
a life true to us
, then we would die without the main regrets that haunt the dying. We would live more fully.

That doesn’t mean you should sell all your belongings and feed the poor in a foreign country. Well, if that’s true to you, go ahead. But the whole point is that your life needs to be true to
you
, not what others expect of you. Maybe that’s feeding the poor. Maybe it’s cooking dinner for your family.

So the question is:
What matters to you?

That’s a critically important question to explore. What matters to you? Of course making enough money, having
enough vacation time, and feeling loved and respected by your family and friends matter. But you know that already. Go deeper.

First, ask yourself what’s working: What about your daily work, your daily life, matters to you? Why are you doing it? What part of your life is a source of pride? What impact do you feel you’re having on people, ideas, or things that are important to you?