18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done (8 page)

Next, ask yourself what’s neutral: What are you spending your time on that you don’t particularly care about? What doesn’t matter to you? What’s not important?

Finally, ask yourself what alienates you: What are you spending your time on—in work or in life—that contradicts what matters to you? What makes you feel bad? Untrue to yourself? What are you, even slightly, embarrassed about?

And then slowly, over time, shift where you’re spending that time, so the scale begins to tip in the direction of what matters to you. Some things you won’t be able to change immediately: Maybe you’re working in the wrong job, for the wrong company. But don’t be afraid to ask the questions; you will be tremendously more dedicated, productive, and effective if you care. If you’re working on things that matter to you.

Can everyone spend their time working on things that matter to them? Maybe not. But I remember listening to a nighttime janitor as she spoke with such deep pride about how well she cleaned, how wonderful the office looked after she finished, and how important she felt it was to the people who worked there during the day. So, maybe yes.

There is no objective measure—certainly not money—that determines the value of a particular kind of work to the person who does it. All that matters is that you do work that matters to you.

I woke up at six in the morning and looked over at my bedside table where Gawande’s article lay open, the photo of an empty wheelchair with a baby’s
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
balloon tied to it staring at me. Once again, I felt that dreaded rush of fear and sadness spread from the center of my chest to the rest of my body.

So I took a deep breath, got out of bed, took a shower, and sat down to write this chapter. To work on this book. Because writing, to me, matters.

W
ait a minute
, I thought as I looked up from the trail we had been hiking for several hours.
Where are we?

I knew I was lost. Unfortunately, I wasn’t alone. I was leading a thirty-day wilderness expedition for the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS). Which, in this case, meant there were eight 16- to 24-year-old students following me.

For most of an expedition, NOLS groups travel off trail. We use topographic maps that reflect the physical features of an area—mountains, streams, valleys, ridges—and we navigate through the wilderness by comparing what we see around us with what’s on the map.

Each morning we agree on our goal—where we plan to camp at the end of the day—and then choose a rough path through the wilderness. We know the general direction we’re moving and maintain our course by paying attention to the environment—keep that mountain to the
left, that small river to the right, and that craggy peak in front.

Every once in a while there happens to be a trail that travels in the same direction we’re traveling so we follow it. It makes for easy walking.

But a dangerous thing happens when we follow a trail: We stop paying attention to the environment. Since the trail is so easy to follow, we allow our minds to wander and neglect to observe where we are.

Then we forge ahead, moving with speed and purpose, right to the point where we look up and realize, as I did that day, that the environment around us is no longer recognizable. Our focus blinded us.

This is not just a hiking thing.

In business and in life, we set all kinds of goals—build a company, meet sales objectives, be a supportive manager—and then we define a strategy for achieving each of them. The goal is the destination; the strategy is our trail to get there.

Only sometimes we get so absorbed in the trail—in how we’re going to achieve the goal, in our method or process—that we lose sight of the destination, of where we were going in the first place. We walk right by the opportunities that would have propelled us forward toward our planned destination.

Which is what happened to Sammy, a religious man who was caught in his house during a flood. He climbed up to his roof and prayed, asking God to save him.

Sammy saw a wood plank in the water and let it float
by. “God will rescue me,” he said to himself. After some time, a man came by in a boat and offered him a lift, but Sammy declined. “God will rescue me,” he told the man. The water continued to rise; it was up to his neck when a helicopter flew overhead. Sammy waved it off, saying, “God will rescue me.” Finally, Sammy drowned.

Next thing he knew, Sammy was in heaven, where he was greeted by God. “Why didn’t you rescue me?” Sammy asked.

“I tried!” God answered. “I sent a wood plank, I sent a boat, I sent a helicopter…”

Okay, so it’s not a true story, but the point is still useful. Sammy was so committed to his strategy of God saving him that he missed the rescue.

I started my company more than twelve years ago with a fifty-page business plan. It was a very useful tool—it kept me focused, helped me avoid mistakes, enabled me to settle on a growth strategy. But if you look at my company today, it looks nothing like that plan.

Because the economy changed, I changed, my clients changed, and the opportunities changed. If I had stuck to my plan, I would have failed. It was keeping my eye on the changing environment, and being willing to toss the plan and create a new one in sync with new realities, that enabled me to grow my business.

I remember hearing a mother speak about how difficult it was for her to parent her autistic child. “I’m not the parent I planned to be,” she said. “I’m the parent I have to be.”

I’ve noticed the same thing about great managers. They might have a plan for how they want to manage. But they’re constantly shifting that plan based on the strengths and weaknesses of the people they’re managing.

Monitor and adjust. That’s the key to effective leadership, indoors or out.

On the trail, I stopped my group of students and admitted that I had gotten us lost. I explained how being too focused on the trail can easily lead us astray.

“Great,” answered a sixteen-year-old boy sarcastically. “So how do we get unlost?”

“You tell me.”

“Look at the map?” he suggested.

“And your surroundings!” I added.

Pausing every once in a while to look at your surroundings—to reconnect with your personal guideposts, your strengths, weaknesses, differences, and passions—can prevent you from being lulled into unconscious movement in the wrong direction.

P
eter, I’d like you to stay for a minute after class,” said Calvin, who teaches my favorite body conditioning class at the gym.

“What’d I do?” I asked him.

“It’s what you didn’t do.”

“What didn’t I do?”

“Fail.”

“You kept me after class for
not
failing?”

“This”—he began to mimic my casual weight-lifting style, using weights that were obviously too light—“is not going to get you anywhere. A muscle only grows if you work it until it fails. You need to use more challenging weights. You need to fail.”

Calvin’s on to something.

Every time I ask a room of executives to list the top five moments their career took a leap forward—not just a step, but a leap—failure is always on the list. For some it was the
loss of a job. For others it was a project gone bad. And for others still it was the failure of a larger system, like an economic downturn, that required them to step up.

Yet most of us spend tremendous effort trying to avoid even the possibility of failure. According to Dr. Carol Dweck, professor at Stanford University, we have a mind-set problem. Dweck has done an enormous amount of research to understand what makes someone give up in the face of adversity versus strive to overcome it.

It turns out the answer is deceptively simple: It’s all in your head.

If you believe that your talents are inborn or fixed, then you will try to avoid failure at all costs because failure is proof of your limitation. People with a fixed mind-set like to solve the same problems over and over again. It reinforces their sense of competence.

Children with fixed mind-sets would rather redo an easy jigsaw puzzle than try a harder one. Students with fixed mind-sets would rather not learn new languages. CEOs with fixed mind-sets will surround themselves with people who agree with them. They feel smart when they get it right.

But if you believe your talent grows with persistence and effort, then you seek failure as an opportunity to improve. People with a growth mind-set feel smart when they’re learning, not when they’re flawless.

Michael Jordan, arguably the world’s best basketball player, has a growth mind-set. Most successful people do. In high school, he was cut from the basketball team. But
obviously that didn’t discourage him: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

If you have a growth mind-set, then you use your failures to improve. If you have a fixed mind-set, you may never fail, but neither do you learn or grow.

In business, we have to be discriminating about when we choose to challenge ourselves. In high-risk, high-leverage situations, it’s better to stay within your current capability. In lower-risk situations, where the consequences of failure are less significant, better to push the envelope. The important point is to know that pushing the envelope, that failing, is how you learn and grow and succeed. It’s your opportunity.

Here’s the good news: You can change your success by changing your mind-set. When Dweck trained children to view themselves as capable of growing their intelligence, they worked harder, more persistently, and with greater success on math problems they had previously abandoned as unsolvable.

A growth mind-set is the secret to maximizing potential. Want to grow your staff? Give them tasks above their abilities. They don’t think they can do it? Tell them you expect them to work at it for a while, struggle with it. That it will take more time than the tasks they’re used to doing. That you expect they’ll make some mistakes along the way. But you know they can do it.

Want to increase your own performance? Set high goals where you have a 50 to 70 percent chance of success. According to the late David McClelland, psychologist and Harvard researcher, that’s the sweet spot for high achievers. Then, when you fail half the time, figure out what you should do differently and try again. That’s practice. And, as we saw earlier, ten thousand hours of that kind of practice will make you an expert in anything. No matter where you start.

The next class I did with Calvin, I doubled the weight I was using. Yeah, that’s right. Unfortunately, that gave me tendonitis in my elbow, which I’m nursing with rest and ice. Sometimes you can fail even when you’re trying to fail.

Hey, I’m learning.

T
here is something curious about a group of houses in Utah. They’re falling apart. Windows covered with wood. Roofs patched with blue tarp, blowing in the wind. Walls simply missing.

And yet people live in them. These houses are not being built; they are half built. This has nothing to do with the real estate crash. It’s not a consequence of poverty, nor is it a design statement.

The houses’ inhabitants simply aren’t motivated to finish them. You see, they’re fundamentalist Mormons who have been excommunicated by the mainstream Mormon church for their practice of polygamy. And their last known leader, Warren Jeffs, had a penchant for predicting the end of the world on a rolling six-months basis.

If you think the world is about to end, what’s the point of fixing your house?

When I described these houses to Anne, a senior
leader of a large retail bank, her face contorted with recognition.

“That’s exactly what I’m doing!” she said.

“Living in an unfinished house?” I asked.

“Yes!” She told me she hadn’t done her usual quarterly all-hands call with her team.

“Why not?” I asked.

“What’s there to say?” Anne responded. “Nothing’s clear. I have no idea what to tell them. Will they be in their roles in two months? Will their priorities change? Will we even exist? There’s too much uncertainty.”

She knew it was a mistake not to do the all-hands call. And yet, she admitted to me, she hadn’t done many of her normal management routines. She regularly canceled meetings with her direct reports and even skipped their performance reviews and career development conversations.

Why have a career development conversation with someone when there’s a good chance they may not have a career with you at all? You’re super-busy, understaffed, stressed, and feeling vulnerable yourself.

On top of all that, the people who report to you aren’t pushing for conversations, either. Sure, they want some answers. But they’re lying low. Keeping their heads down, trying not to make a splash. Because if you happen to be working on that layoff plan when they come by, you might take notice and add their name to the list. So they try to look busy. And they take the long way to the bathroom to avoid your office.

Here’s the problem: When our future is uncertain, we have a hard time functioning in the present.

So what should you do?

David McClelland, the Harvard psychology professor introduced a little earlier, wrote the book
Human Motivation
. It’s 688 pages long, but since the world might end in six months, I’ll give you the short version. Everyone is driven by three things: