You can Become a Superhero
[Author’s note: This post is a chapter of my forthcoming book
RESET: Building Purpose in the Age of Digital Distraction]
Chapter Ten: Supercharge
What is the most important mistake I make all the time?
“If you spend your life trying to be good at everything, you will never be great at anything.”
Tom Rath, American Author
My wife is an amazing person. She is an endless source of inspiration for me both personally and professionally. She regularly does things that impress me with her capacity for love, wisdom, care, and optimism.
She’s taught me a lot, even though I often reject each lesson the first time she tries to teach me. Or the second time. Or the third . . .
A few years ago, the two of us were in Nigeria to run an entrepreneurial training program for GE called the Lagos Garage.
We loved it. The program was the first of its kind: an immersive experience that combined the best parts of the educational, vocational, and entrepreneurial approaches to economic development. We were there to unleash the creative energy of thousands of Nigerians, who are building a brighter future for the country!
The Lagos Garage was an amazing experience for many reasons: the mission; the people; the location; and the culture. Most important, though, was that my wife and I ran the program together.
Even though the program was funded by GE, we were on a shoestring budget. There was also a neverending stream of challenges, from flaky partners to aggressive building owners. There were days when we weren’t sure if the managers were going to let us stay in the classroom through the end of the program! Thank God my wife was there to smooth things over with people. Negotiating is one of her many talents, and definitely not one of mine.
Hot & Cold
One of my main responsibilities was to build the four-week curriculum. I drew heavily from my experiences in the Marines, at Stanford, working for Singularity University, and as an entrepreneur myself.
Even though all the topics had been finalized weeks before, I was never satisfied. I revisited every detail, thinking about things from every angle, then tweaking and rewriting the curriculum. The Lagos Garage was an experiment in a different way of training entrepreneurs. If — when — we were successful, GE would have a new model for supporting economic growth in emerging economies around the world.
My wife was preoccupied with other aspects of the program (for example, making sure we weren’t kicked out of the building). But she was also going to help teach the entrepreneurs. This only made sense, since she has an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. And is a total badass, which I think I already mentioned.
Still, I couldn’t help but stress out about her portion of the curriculum. Each day I’d start harassing her a few hours before the participants arrived. “Hey, you’ve got to start rehearsing what you’re going to talk about today.”
She would look up from her work and politely brush me off, saying, “Okay honey, I’ll take care of it.” Then she went turn away and go back to whatever she was doing.
I would return to bug her every twenty or thirty minutes. She would smile and nod — her mouth tightening a bit each time — then keep doing what she was doing. The cycle repeated until it was ten minutes before the session is supposed to start.
And I’m freaking out by the end. I do not handle anxiety well.
At all.
“What are you doing?” I would screech. “You’re not prepared and we start in five minutes. Almost everybody’s here and you’re not ready! The class is going to suck! The program is going to suck! Everything will suck and we will never get to work on stuff like this again! Why are you to trying to ruin this opportunity for me? I thought you loved me!”
Aren’t you glad you aren’t married to me?
Superwoman
When we finally kicked off with her opening remarks, my wife took effortless control of the room. She mesmerized the entire audience. People were on the edge of their seats. They could listen to her for hours on end, drawing insights and getting inspired to take their businesses to the next level.
She can have this level of impact on any group of people. And she can hold attention for however long she wants to talk. My wife is a charismatic person naturally, so when she actually tries to be ramp up her energy the result is nothing short of jaw-dropping. No one can touch her when she’s in front of a group.
Something clicked for me by the third week. I watched my wife in front of all these people, completely in her element. I realized that I was watching someone world class. Like, she’s in the top 1% in the world.
She knows exactly how to grab the room, to establish a deep connection with each and every person. Being onstage is so natural to her. She is in her environment, and she knows it. It’s a beautiful thing to behold.
And then there’s me. I go over the lesson plan dozens of times and can still fall flat. That’s pretty ridiculous if you think about it. After all, I wrote the lesson plan. These classes should be a no-brainer for me, but I often struggle to connect with my audience. It takes hours of preparation for me to feel comfortable enough to bond with participants when I run a workshop or class. And the whole time I’m aware that my wife would do a much better job.
This was a frustrating experience for me in some ways. I have to admit I was a bit jealous. Okay, maybe a lot jealous.
But can you blame me? I want the satisfaction of being great. None of us want to end up with a thirteenth place trophy, or even second place. We want to win. We want to be first place. We want to be great!
What I learned from my wife was how we — starting with me — often channel energy into the wrong areas of our life.
Pointless Competition
Developing unique skills is a key challenge and opportunity in the creative economy. Think about the power we can unlock with this approach.
Take the time to seriously consider this question: “Can I take my natural talents and work hard with other talented people to develop something that is uniquely valuable to other people?”
That was the revelation that my wife demonstrated to me for weeks before I really understood it. Don’t try to balance yourself out.
Supercharge yourself!
If you maximize your strengths, then your weaknesses will become irrelevant as you work with other people. The power of your strengths will attract other people to complement you. Your world class effectiveness will inspire others to take it to the next level. Or several levels! That sort of beneficial dynamic guarantees your value, and theirs.
Choosing mediocrity, by contrast, means choosing a life defined by insecurity. You can replace average, but you can’t replace great.
If You Can’t Beat ‘em…
Peter Thiel, billionaire entrepreneur and investor, dealt with a near-fatal business situation early in his career when he was building the financial services company PayPal. Elon Musk, another famous Silicon Valley entrepreneur, was working on a similar company called X.com. The two entrepreneurs and their companies fought each other viciously at first, but wised up after a few months.
Rather than try to destroy each other, they decided to combine forces and leverage the unique strengths of each company. The resulting partnership was incredibly successful. The new and improved PayPal grew even faster, and it was purchased by eBay in 2002 for $1.4 billion.
The same principle holds true in the much smaller activities. It’s not just about business. My wife and I know to separate cooking — her job — from setting the table and washing the dishes — my job. If we didn’t play to our strengths, we would end up with disgusting food and dirty dishes.
The Flaw of Averages
Don’t strive to be the average of all the things you can do. Instead focus on the things you do really well. Those are the activities that are most likely to fulfill us and ultimately have the largest positive impact on others.
And positive impact through daily actions is how we should define success in the digital world. As we learned last chapter, success is not just another word for rich, or some abstract goal for the future. Success is the daily practice of positive impact based on our specific strengths.
Earn that Black Belt
Supercharging yourself is one of the first steps to a successful life. Why? Because we can only be consistently impactful — and rewarded for that impact — in areas where we become masters. Areas where we are uniquely good. And that level of skill and confidence only results from developing our strengths to an uncommon level.
Achieving mastery lets us tap into both the analytic and creative parts of our souls. Mastery sustains us through difficult periods where we don’t get the financial or social rewards we had expected. We learn to embrace the process and not get distracted with worldly outcomes. You’re doing this for you, after all.
Mastery breeds confidence like nothing else. That’s the power of repetition and results. No one can take away that confidence once it takes root. Someone’s opinion holds no weight compared to what you know you can do.
Mastery also frees us to focus on the impact we have on other people, not just ourselves. Over time we stop being self-conscious. With practice, our unique skills become extensions of us. We can fade into the background and let the results speak for themselves.
We become masters through a combination of two things:
- natural ability
- dedicated practice
You might think the practice is harder part, but actually most of us cannot clearly identify our natural abilities. We often try to develop the wrong skills because we don’t get enough critical feedback from people around us.
Acknowledging that we’re not good at something is impossible for us. We were taught to do the exact opposite in school. Refer back to Chapter 2 if you need a refresher on all the ways we are led down the wrong path in traditional school classrooms.
Educational Malware
Would you call someone a good student if they showed you their report card and it had three As and three Fs? Of course not! That’s a C average. No one is shooting for a C average.
But that is how the creative economy works. Averages don’t matter. Focus on the areas where you are talented, then find people who make your weaknesses irrelevant. You could have one A and five Fs and still be very successful!
It’s time to reprogram your mind. You have to discard that old industrial age mindset of basic competence in a wide range of skills. You are not a Swiss Army Knife. That flawed model is holding you back.
You need to stop labeling the areas where you struggle as “bad” and other areas as “good”. No one should be striving to be “good” at everything. Weak points are actually opportunities for collaboration!
In the creative economy, you will be rewarded for your ability to attract people with complementary skills. You want to build these people into a coalition of willing members who want to work together and solve a problem of common interest.
How can we start acting in line with this revelation? You need to identify these opportunities for collaboration. And that means you have to figure out where you can use a bit of help.
Starting Point
Like most people, your abilities fall on a bell-shaped curve. Think of a camel’s hump. It starts skinny on one end, grows fatter towards the middle, and then gets skinny again. The skinny part on the left represent your abilities that are truly horrible. As the curve gets fatter toward the middle, you are progressing into areas where you are…not terrible. The big fat middle represents all those abilities where you are average. You’re one of the crowd, which is totally fine. Then you proceed into the skinny end of the right you are good, great, and finally, world class.
We’ve been trained to pay attention to the big fat middle. Don’t do that! The skinny parts — the extreme abilities — are where things get interesting. Other people sit up and take notice when you engage in these activities. Sometimes that is because you suck, and are embarrassing yourself. Other times it’s because you are crushing it.
That second one is your sweet spot. Your zone of potential mastery. This is where you can become truly world-class. You can supercharge!
The tricky part is mapping out this curve. You don’t want to invest a bunch of time and energy into activities where you can only be pretty good. You should be aiming for mastery.
Only a lucky few can objectively assess ourselves, though. The rest of us have a hard time gaining perspective on something as personal as our God-given abilities. Many of us hang on to impressions from our past. It’s like someone trying desperately to convince everyone that she is a great writer because a 10th grade english teacher once gave her an “A-” on an essay.
This is where the bias toward action will come in handy. Don’t start identifying strengths by thinking. Go do things! Do things you haven’t done before.
Do more intense versions of things that you’ve already done.
Do the same thing with more people.
Do the same thing with different people.
The Gift That Keeps On Giving
Taking action gives you the greatest gift anyone can have: feedback. For most of us it is impossible to understand where we fall on the spectrum without feedback. This is why engaging in a wide variety of activities is the best place to start. You only get feedback after you try lots of stuff.
Feedback is useful because it clumps at the extreme ends of the spectrum. You will receive feedback about the activities where you are terrible and the activities where you are great. Average experiences do not galvanize anyone into giving feedback.
You’re not going to get an email from somebody after a meeting that says “Hey, that was pretty average. Okay, talk to you later.”
Someone’s either going to say, “Man, you tanked. What happened?” or, “Wow, that was amazing. You did a great job!”
This feedback is priceless to someone who wants to be world class. It’s the best approach to identifying opportunities to supercharge. You take action, then you listen for feedback, and then you improved based on what you heard. Act, listen, improve.
This is the individual version of Silicon Valley’s Minimum Viable Product that we already learned about. The difference here is that you are your own MVP. The key concept is to learn and improve, not fall in love with yourself as you are right now.
You are version 1.0 and are only going to get better.
Future Clues
With each cycle of action and feedback, you will get closer to your true potential. Each bit of feedback is a sign pointing you in the right direction, a gift from someone to help you find your way. A clue to a future you!
With enough feedback, you can be confident in areas of potential mastery based on evidence. It’s not just you trying to become a great designer because you read a cool article about design, or because you like to wear black glasses with thick frames. Instead you have a sturdy foundation of people telling you what they loved, and what they hated.
Listening to feedback isn’t the only way to identify potential areas of mastery. You can also pay attention to your emotions. Look for moments when you see another person doing something and think, “I can do better than that!” These are points where the creativity inside you bubbles up. You spontaneously imagine yourself excelling in that activity. Again, this is a clue to the parts of your life where you can stand out. That emotional connection indicates that you will be willing to prove that your can excel through months or years of work.
Back in 2012, I watched two people run a innovation session with a Canadian company called ExperiencePoint. They were teaching a large group how to apply the core principles of Design Thinking: observe people, form insights about their behavior, brainstorm solutions, and rapidly test those solutions with cheap experiments.
It was a fascinating session, and I studied the facilitators intently. I paid attention to their body language, tone of voice, and dynamic with the audience. And I decided on the spot that I could do this better than the guys I was watching, even though they were professionals.
My wife can carry a group with sheer charisma, but these guys were doing something very different. With ExperiencePoint, the goal is to distill complex concepts into simple, digestible information via interactive group work. To connect the dots between the experience of the participants during the session to their day-to-day work. The participants are being taught the mechanics and language of Design Thinking, which we talked about in Chapter 8.
This simplifying process was something I knew I could do. More than that, I could do it really, really well.
I worked on my facilitation skills for several years, doing free work whenever I could to further develop myself. Two years later I was referred to ExperiencePoint by a friend with whom I ran a session. I jumped at the chance to get certified and am now one of their highest ranked facilitators, running sessions for all kinds of organizations across the country.
What a confidence-building feeling, to go from nothing to an expert, and all based on a feeling! It was impossible to ignore, like I was being pulled toward something. And I had no previous experience with anything like it before. All I knew was, “I can do that better.”
That’s a clue, so pay attention to it. Listen to your soul. The activities that appeal to you, however unlikely they seem, could be something on which you build a successful career.
The “Sort Of” Trap
“But what about all those things I sort of like?” you might ask. “I’ve always thought it would be sort of cool to [insert random dream here].”
I hope I don’t lose you with my response, but I can’t lie to you. Ignore that stuff. Run away from all your sort of dreams!
Seriously, push all those thoughts of your mind. Throw away all those lukewarm fantasies. They don’t matter. All the stuff that you kind of want to do should be avoided at all costs.
Highly focused and purpose-driven people know this. This is part of the feedback process that we discussed last chapter, where Jessica paid close attention to which of her daily actions led to the desired outcome. She had to be ruthlessly focused on the stuff that worked and that appealed to her. Both boxes must be checked.
Warren Buffett asks his employees to write down a list of Top 25 goals. The first five items go on their To Do List. The next twenty items become the Avoid At All Costs List. The lesson? Only go for what truly matters because life will inevitably distract you. That advice is even more important in the digital world.
The time you spend on things you kind of want to do will strangle your true dreams. The digital world will dangle those half-hearted opportunities in front of you all the time. Ignore them. You want to be on fire for your goals, barreling toward them as fast as you can.
Figuring out these goals is a tough process. It takes a long time, and isn’t for the faint of heart. Fortunately, you don’t need to go through the supercharging process alone.
Think of your close friends and family. People who know you well. What would they say if you asked them about the activities where you truly excel? You might get a variety of responses in terms of details, but there will be an unmistakable trend. A few of your strengths will rise to the top.
Be prepared for surprising feedback. The strengths your friends identify may not align with the way you think about yourself. You may have imagined yourself doing very different things to have an impact in the world.
Try not to get hung up with the details right now. The key to supercharging is giving yourself permission to become great. You are creating space to progress toward mastery. And no one ever said mastery was easy. That’s why we need help!
What you need to remember about “Supercharge”
- Focus on your strengths, don’t try to even yourself out
- Enlist the help of other people who complement your strengths
- Focus your efforts on a few things that you desperately want to do
- Pay attention to the feedback you get from other people
Actions that require under 10 minutes
- Write yourself an email with the subject “My Legacy” that lists ten family and friends that you can survey to determine your greatest strengths. Continue by listing five fun activities that you need to avoid because they are used as distractions from focusing on your greatest strengths.
Actions that require under 30 minutes
- Write down your own version of Warren Buffett’s Top 25 list. Circle the top 5 and then write a date next to each of them to indicate when (the month and year) you want to complete it. Then identify the skills that you will need to accomplish each goal, plus a teacher you can use and a student you will help along the way.
- Make a list of 10 activities where you get positive feedback from other people, or where you get that “I can do that better!” feeling. Go through the list scoring each activity on a 1–10 scale, with 10 being something you love doing every day no matter what.
Actions that require an hour or more
- Send out a survey to trustworthy friends and family with your top 10 activities list. Ask them for their honest opinion of whether they think you should pursue any of these, and why or why not. Analyze the results by grouping useful feedback into areas of potential mastery. Consider your life if you pursued each activity. What would your day look like? Who could you talk to that does that now?
- If you are willing to be more open about this, put up the same survey on Facebook or your favorite social media community. Ask the same questions and follow up with people individually if they respond.
