PURPOSEFULLY CLEAR

by Dr. Cecil Clements (11th December 2012)

I remember a time when I was sitting in a car with a good friend of mine, reminiscing about different things. One of the questions veered towards ‘Are we fulfilling our potential? Are there things that need to get done that have got derailed along the way?’ My friend said to me, “I remember a brilliant classmate of mine. Everything that he did was extraordinary. He topped all exams, was the first one out when there were campus recruitments, got the best jobs. I followed his career graph and it was meteoric. Then suddenly there seemed to be stagnation. He began to meander. Soon everybody else overtook him. I’ve always looked back at this person and thought – What a waste of potential! I really don’t understand what happened to him.”

As I reflected on that, I thought that it is actually so easy for us to get caught in a similar situation. As we go through life, we have so many opportunities. To be able to seize the right one is crucial for us.

Greg McKeown calls it ‘The Clarity Paradox’. He says, “Sometimes you see people who ought to be successful, who were successful at one point and then aren’t now. One of the reasons for that is that they are caught up in this ‘Clarity Paradox’. There are 4 predictable phases in this paradox:”

• Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it leads to success.
• Phase 2: When we have success, it leads to more options and opportunities. When we are successful in the things that we are doing, then more and more people want to interact with us, there are more opportunities for us to get out, meet people and speak.
• Phase 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts. When we take those opportunities, those increased options, then we are spread thin and our efforts are diffused across a wide spectrum of things.
• Phase 4: Diffused efforts undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first     place.

That’s why he calls this a paradox. It doesn’t make sense. You start out with clarity of purpose and as that goes to its logical conclusion, it ends up that the very clarity is undermined and the success that should have come is missing. Curiously, success is a catalyst for failure. That’s a huge overstatement but yet, there’s an element of truth in it. Sometimes, success itself can become the key, the goal, the thing that pushed us, and we forget how it is that we got there in the first place and lose sight of the basics. When we do that, failure is inevitable.

Jim Collins wrote a book called ‘How The Mighty Fall’. One of the key things he says is that there’s “the undisciplined pursuit of more.” He goes on to give 5 stages of decline and I think it’s true not only for companies but also for individuals as well.

1. Hubris born of success. There’s an arrogant neglect. It’s almost as if we know too much.
2. Undisciplined pursuit of more. Pursuing the next thing out of ambition, creativity or even fear that I may lose what I have.
3. Denial of risk and peril. Tuning out clues about the decline. You’re not seeing it or you don’t want to see it.
4. Grasping for salvation. Make big bold moves rather than solid progress. Try and innovate and be creative without really saying, “Is this what I really need to put back in?”
5. Capitulation to irrelevance or death. You run out of options.

All of us can get caught in this kind of rut where we start off being very successful, doing the things that we are passionate about; doing the right things. Then all of a sudden, we wake up one day and say, “It’s a long time since I had any passion, any zeal about the things that I am doing. I may look around and say I’ve done some good things. I’m looked on as a success. But deep inside, I really don’t think of myself like that.”

Greg McKeown says, “The price of a dream job really is to be able to say ‘No’ to the many good parallel paths you encounter.” there are so many good parallel paths that are not really great paths that we need.

As Jim Collins would say elsewhere, “Good is the enemy of the great.”

So how do we avoid this clarity paradox and continue our upward momentum? Here are three suggestions:

1. Use more extreme criteria. It’s like when we go into our closets and say, “Is there a chance that I will wear this someday in the future?” we look at all the clothes that we have. The immediate thought is – of course I would. But if we change the question and say, “Do I absolutely love this?” then we will be able to eliminate the clutter and have space for something better. So we need to change the question. Apply tougher criteria. In searching for ‘a good opportunity’, we’ll find many good opportunities. But we probably need to do an advanced search and ask 3 questions: What am I deeply passionate about?
   What taps my talent?
   What meets a significant need in the world?
   If we can answer this, it’s going to narrow down our options of course, but we’re not looking for many good things. We’re looking for the absolute highest point of contribution.
2. Ask “What is essential?” and eliminate the rest. Eliminate the non-essentials. How do we do that?
   Conduct a life audit. Look at our desks. However much we try, our desks continue to get cluttered. They are all well-intended ideas that just continue to pile up but they come with no expiration date. So they just go one on top of the other. We need to be able to say, “This gets out of my page.”
   Harvard Business Review gives a management tip of the day, every day and on November 29, they had: “Keep your to-do list fresh with a 3-day rule. A to-do list is only useful if you cross things off as often as you add tasks on. If something’s been on your list for more than 3 days, do one of the following:
• Do it immediately – it may take you less time than you think.
• Schedule it – find a time slot on your calendar when you can get the task done. If it’s important enough to have on your list, then commit to doing it at a specific time and day
• Let it die – if you are not willing to do something immediately or schedule it for later, you won’t ever do it. Accept that it’s not really a priority and take it off your list.
• So make sure that you’re not piling up things, that you’re not getting caught up in things that are spreading you thin and taking you away from the key things that you had put in to be able to do something that is of significance.
3. Beware of the endowment effect. This is the tendency to value an item more once we own it. This is what I have become and I want to keep it like that. We love to hoard. If you collect books or whatever, ask yourself, “How much do I really value this item?” you’ll find that you do value it. But instead ask the question, “If I did not own this item, how much would I pay to obtain it?”

The same goes for career opportunities. ‘How much do I value this opportunity?’ can be replaced by ‘If I did not have this opportunity, how much would I be willing to sacrifice in order to obtain it?’

We need to be able to go after the things that are really important for us, especially as you look at being successful. You will get to a point where you are getting thin, diffused, lost in all the irrelevant things that come with being successful. You need to always step back and say, “Do I have clarity of purpose?” The many opportunities that come with who you are right now, are what will pull you and me down. We need to always go back to the basics and say, “Is this what I’m passionate about? Is this what really taps into my talent? Is this a significant need in the world?” somehow then, as the author says, we will have a better chance of going after the really important things in our lives. Ultimately that is what our lives must be – lives of significance.

Let me pray for you. Almighty God, help us to live lives of significance. Show us the things that would easily cause us to get ensnared and entangled, that are really not of any relevance. Show us the dreams that you have for us, the plans that you have for us and help us to walk in those plans. Today, would You show us the many things in our lives that we ought not to be doing, so that we can quickly get rid of these nonessentials. I pray blessing on each and every person on this call. In the Name of Jesus, we pray. Amen.