18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done (21 page)

I
was driving in the mountains in upstate New York when I found myself in a sudden snowstorm. It was hard to see, the road was slick, and I could feel the wind pushing my car around. I was scared.

I thought about pulling over and waiting it out, but I had no idea how long it would last. So I kept going, but realized I needed to drastically change my driving. I slowed down, put on my hazards, turned off the radio and phone, and inched my way forward. A ride that normally took one hour lasted three, but I arrived safely.

Here’s what surprised me: Once I changed my driving to match the conditions, I actually enjoyed it. The silence was relaxing and the snow was stunningly beautiful.

Driving safely through a storm requires that you change
how
you drive; you have to stay alert and adapt to the shifting conditions.

Welcome to life. The conditions are constantly shifting—almost as fast and frequently as the weather—and if you keep doing the same things in the rain that you did when it was nice and sunny, you’ll crash. You need to change your approach.

Change doesn’t mean doing
more
of the same: selling harder, working longer hours, being more aggressive. That won’t help. If you’re playing basketball and suddenly you find yourself on a football field, using more force to bounce the basketball on the grass doesn’t make sense. You need to drop the basketball, pick up a football, and run with it.

And notice, when you’re running with the football, are you still using basketball skills and muscles and strategies? Are you thinking and acting like a basketball player on a football field? Or have you truly and fully switched games? Have you become a football player?

If you change your approach, not only can you succeed in this moment, but you have also forever expanded your repertoire of movement. And a wider repertoire of movement makes for a better, more effective, more resilient business, and more capable, happier people.

So often we hear about the importance of being consistent. Let that go. Try to be
inconsistent
. Modify your action to match the changing terrain. Because it’s always changing. So there’s no simple formula that will get you through every situation you encounter.

Well, except maybe this one.

Before you do or say anything, ask yourself three questions:

Then, and
only
then, decide what you will do or say. Choose the response that leverages your strengths, uses your weaknesses, reflects your differences, expresses your passion, and
meets people where they are and is appropriate to the situation you’re in
.

Let’s say the economic environment is weak. What’s the situation? In an era when huge, established businesses have faltered, the new competitive advantages are trust, reliability, and relationships.

Who else is involved? Think about your clients, prospects, and employees. What are they looking for in this situation? Where are they vulnerable? What support do they need?

Then think about how you can help. What can you offer that will support others
at this time
?

Once you’ve thought this through in general, apply it in real time when specific opportunities present themselves. For example, let’s say a client wants to cancel part of a project he had previously committed to.

You’ll have an immediate, instinctive reaction. Maybe you desperately need the money to stay profitable. Maybe you believe that contracts should never be broken.
Maybe you don’t trust your client; you think he’s taking advantage of you.

But before you act instinctively,
pause
. Take a breath. Ask yourself the three questions. What’s the outcome you’re trying to achieve? Immediate money? A long-term relationship? Respect in the industry? Something else?

Knowing that trust is the new competitive advantage, you might choose a different response. Maybe you give the client some wiggle room. Which, perhaps, is not your natural, habitual reaction. But you realize it shows understanding, which builds trust and relationships, which, in these economic conditions, is a great investment.

Then you discover something else. A hidden gift in an otherwise depressing economy. Your client put you in a tough spot, and you rose to the occasion, showing true character, which created a deeper relationship. When the economy improves, chances are you’ve got a client for life. A devoted fan, maybe even a friend, who will refer you to many other clients, because you took a chance for him.

This is the interesting part: That opportunity would never have presented itself if the economy hadn’t turned bad, if the client hadn’t needed a favor, and if you hadn’t paused, understood the opportunity, and taken a chance.

Value investors will tell you that they make all their money when the market is depressed. That gives them the opportunity to buy low. Think of any obstacle as the equivalent of buying low. A poor economy is an opportunity to forge relationships that will last for decades. A failure is
the opportunity to rectify the mistake and develop deep, committed, loyal employees, customers, and partners.

Change isn’t a distraction. It’s not an impediment. It doesn’t need to slow you down. Think of it as an opportunity to show your flexibility and build trust as a consequence.

Pause. Breathe. Ask the three questions. Who knows, it’s possible you might even find some beauty in a storm.

I
lost eighteen pounds in a month and a half.

I didn’t exercise harder or longer than usual. I didn’t read a new diet book supported by evidence and filled with rules and recipes. I didn’t go to a trainer.

I’ve done all those things in the past, and some of them worked, but none of them lasted. They were too complicated or too expensive or too cumbersome to continue.

So I made a different decision this time. A much simpler one.

First, a little background on losing weight. Every new diet book explains why it’s better than all the previous ones. This new plan, the author claims with enthusiasm, holds the key to losing weight and keeping it off forever. It will succeed where the others have failed.

So we decrease our fat consumption. Or increase it. We eat more protein. Or less. We raise our intake of carbohydrates.
Or reduce it. And the question lingers: Which is the best diet to lose weight?

Well, we now have the answer. A study published in
The New England Journal of Medicine
put 811 overweight adults through four different diets, each one a different proportion of fat, carbohydrates, and protein.

The result? On average, participants lost twelve pounds after six months and kept nine pounds off after two years.
No matter which diet they followed
.

Certainly, some diets are healthier than others. But in terms of losing weight? No diet was better than any other. Because all diets work through a single mechanism—they restrict your calorie intake. People lose weight when they eat less.

If that’s true, then the best diet is the simplest one. So I asked myself: What’s the one thing I can change that will make the biggest difference in my calorie consumption? Everyone has one thing.

Mine was sugar. Sometimes I would eat three bowls of ice cream in a day. If I changed that, everything else would work itself out. Cutting out sugar was the one thing that would give me the highest return.

So I stopped eating it. No more cookies, candy, cake, ice cream. That’s the only change I consciously made. I sidestepped millions of complex little decisions that most diets require—counting, weighing, choosing, deciding. No phases, no recipes, no thinking.

Each person’s one thing could be different. For some, it
might be fried foods. For others, meat. For others still, soft drinks. What’s important is to keep it simple.

The implications of this are huge, not just for diets but for all behavior change. After all, what else is a diet but behavior change?

Typically, people overwhelm themselves with tasks in their eagerness to make a change successfully. But that’s a mistake. Instead, they should take the time up front to figure out the one and only thing that will have the highest impact and then focus 100 percent of their effort on that one thing.

You’ve just finished this book and no doubt have lots of great ideas about what you could do differently. Over time you can implement many of them. Maybe you already have. If you’re having difficulty starting, though, choose your one thing—the one thing that will make the biggest impact.

Maybe it’s structuring your to-do list around your annual focus. Maybe it’s stopping multitasking. Or maybe, it’s pausing every hour to take a deep breath and refocus.

Choose the one thing that you think—given your particular situation—will make the biggest difference in your life. Choose it and do it.

After that, you can begin to incorporate more aspects of the plan. In fact, they’ll probably start to incorporate themselves.

Once I stopped eating sugar, I began to do other things—like exercise more routinely and eat more vegetables and less fat. I didn’t force myself to do those
things. They just seemed to happen once I started avoiding sugar.

A few years ago, a
Fortune
100 client asked me to design a new leadership training program. They already had one and had spent several years training people in it, but now they wanted a new one. Why? Because the current one wasn’t having the impact they wanted.

I asked to see the old one. Honestly? While I’d love to say my leadership ideas are far superior, I thought the ones they were using were equally good. Leadership models are no different from diets—most of them are just fine. The brilliance is rarely in the model; it’s in the implementation.

Don’t start from scratch, I pleaded with them. You’ve already spent years spreading the word, inculcating the language, and socializing the concepts of the old leadership methodology. People are familiar with it. Don’t get rid of it.

Just simplify it. Reduce it to its essence. What’s the one thing that will have the greatest impact on your leadership?

After some thought, they concluded that if managers communicated more with their employees, it would solve the majority of their issues. Great, I suggested, focus all your efforts on that. Let everything else go.

Brandon, a friend of mine, called me, disheartened, after his business didn’t work out. He decided to take a few months off before starting his next venture, and we discussed
how he should spend his time. It turns out that Brandon is dyslexic and has always had difficulty reading.

We agreed he should do one thing in his time off: Read every day. That’s unusual advice from me. Usually, I tell people to forget about their weaknesses and focus on their strengths. But in Brandon’s case the dividend will be huge. If he can tackle reading, not only will it open doors for him, but he’ll also conquer the one thing he thought he couldn’t do. That confidence will change everything else in his life.

If you’re going to work on a weakness, always choose a single, high-leverage one.

A large retail chain with stores all over the world developed ten “Gold” behaviors they wanted all sales associates to exhibit. Things like greet each customer, ask customers if they want an accessory at the point of sale, measure customers for a good fit, and thank each customer for shopping at the store. Stores in which sales associates exhibited all ten behaviors saw a substantial increase in sales.