While there is no formula that can be applied to every life to provide the key to certain success, regularly scanning for the Seven Deadly Sins of Mediocrity is the best method for staying on an upward trajectory. It’s not foolproof, however. It requires one additional element: drive. You can have the map, and there can be gas in the tank, but unless you’re willing to fire up the engine and put your foot on the gas, you’ll never get anywhere. Intention and theory don’t change the world; decisive action does.
As such, this final chapter is a “gut check” to challenge you to really consider where you are in your work, where you’d like to be, and how you’ll get there. What follows are some final thoughts on the nature of contribution to help you stay resolved to unleash your best work rather than settle.
There is a five-step process (which follows the acronym EMPTY) you can follow to scan your life for potential action points, and position yourself to do work you’ll be proud of later. While the approach described below is introduced in a work context, any and all of these questions can benefit you in any aspect of your life. It’s impossible to truly separate your “work” life from your “personal” life, so there is little difference between the demands on your time from your job or your family and friends. You still have only so many resources to go around, and you have to get good at how you allocate them. Feel free to adapt the process to fit your needs and to help you gain traction on what matters most to you.
Principle: Establishing genuine connections with others will prevent guardedness from infecting your life.
When we disconnect or become guarded, we reduce the potential for serendipitous insights and connections that often come through unexpected interactions with others, and we also limit our own ability to stretch outside our relational comfort zone, which is the very thing that often leads to the discovery of new insights about our abilities and preferences.
Running Toward Others
To ensure that you are engaging in your life and work in such a way that you are maximizing your contribution, you must pursue relationships with the same level of diligence and urgency. You cannot operate by default; you must instead have a plan for how you will regularly scan your life for open loops, and how you will intentionally pursue relationships that keep you on track with your goals. There are two strategies to help you do this: Find Mirrors and Use Probing Conversations.
Principle: Find your voice and conquer the fear of failure by taking small, calculated risks each day.
How much time do you spend doing the true work that really adds value on a daily basis? Because that work is your voice. It is the unique combination of passions, skills, and experiences with which you alone are capable of approaching your work. However, many people succumb to the paralyzing forces of fear and choose to stay “close to the middle” or simply do what’s expected by others rather than engaging in the small risks necessary to uncover and apply their voice to their work. In doing this, they sadly leave much of their unique contribution unrealized.
Follow the Arrows
It was the willingness to face the possibility of rejection that eventually led to a discovery of something unexpected and incredibly valuable. There was no guarantee of success. However, few succeed in being remarkable without the willingness to embrace the potential of failure.
Principle: Confidence and adaptability prevent an inflated ego from stalling progress on your most important work.
The key counterpoint to ego is adaptability. This means cultivating the willingness to confidently bend to your environment while still maintaining a strong sense of self and purpose. To maintain traction and prevent ego from stalling your progress, you must develop the ability to subvert your egocentric needs for the sake of the work, which in the end is often the best thing for you as well.
Get Real with a SWOT Analysis
Self-awareness is an important aspect of consistent performance, and it’s also critical to avoiding the dangers of ego inflation. One way to root yourself in reality is to conduct a regular SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for Strengths (the activities you are naturally good at), Weaknesses (the activities you struggle with), Opportunities (areas where you are likely to perform well if given a chance), and Threats (areas where you are vulnerable). While this exercise is often performed by organizations as a means to explore strategy options, it can also be valuable on an individual basis to help you determine where to place your focus and to help you maintain a realistic sense of your performance.
Principle: Knowing yourself will help you counter self-delusion and pursue the unique contribution you alone are capable of making.
The stories we believe about how the world works often play a critical role in helping us interpret the meaning of events. They provide a framework–a worldview–through which we filter our experiences. As such, the stories we tell ourselves–and tell about ourselves–can be either motivating, contributive forces or limiting, destructive forces as we strive to unleash our best work. It’s important that we gain an understanding of not only what those deeply held beliefs are, but also how they might be affecting our daily activity. Doing so, and then mapping our activity around that self-knowledge, is one of the keys to sustained success.
Principle: To make a valuable contribution, you have to get uncomfortable and embrace lifelong growth and skill development.
Growth is about daily, measured, and disciplined action. It’s about embracing purposeful skill development and pursuing new opportunities that stretch you to step beyond your comfort zone, even when it means venturing boldy into the unknown.
Step, Sprint, and Stretch
Growth doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of intentional effort and consistent progress. You must define how you want to grow, then establish a plan to help you get there. There are three kinds of goals that help you grow: Step, Sprint, and Stretch. A step goal is a very short-arc goal (often daily) that helps you maintain forward progress, even if it’s small progress. A sprint goal is a medium-arc goal (a week or two weeks) that causes you to go beyond yourself for a season in order to increase your capacity, and a stretch goal is a long-arc goal that forces you to go far beyond your comfort zone.
Principle: To prevent boredom from dulling your senses, you must approach your work with a curious mind-set.
All great feats and brilliant accomplishments, regardless of their nature, begin with a question: Why? How? What if? The response to that question leads to another one, which provokes another, and so on. The pursuit of sustained, great work demands a commitment to pursuing the answers to a never-ending series of inquiries. However, in dealing with the pragmatic elements of daily life and work, our curiosity can become worn and obscured by a tangle of tasks and expectations. We can fall out of touch with our deeper questions and lose the will to ponder.
Reclaim curiosity by embracing an engagement mind-set rather than an entertainment mind-set. This means dedicating yourself to the pursuit of new and better questions, attuning your mind to dive deeply into important problems, and questioning the assumptions that sometimes limit fresh new perspectives.
