I remember a time when I was sitting in a car with a good friend of mine, reminiscing about different things. As the conversation went along, 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; everything that he did was extraordinary, pure gold. He topped all the 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 some kind of stagnation. He began to meander. Soon, everybody else overtook him. I always looked back at this person and thought – What a waste of potential! I really don't understand what happened to him."
I've reflected on that conversation many times and thought that it is sometimes very easy for us to get caught in similar situations. As we go through life, we have so many opportunities, and it is crucial for us to be able to seize the right one. Amongst the many opportunities are also subtle traps that may take us away from the one thing that has kept us focused all along.
Greg McKeown calls this "the clarity paradox" and he says, "Sometimes you see people who ought to be successful, who were successful at one point but aren't now, and one of the reasons is that they are caught up in this clarity paradox." How do we understand or get an idea of whether or not, we are caught in this clarity paradox? He says, "There are 4 predictable phases to this paradox."
Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, and it leads to success.
Phase 2: We have the success, and this success 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 and meet people and speak to varying audiences.
Phase 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts. When we take those opportunities and those increased options, then we begin to get spread thin, and our efforts are diffused across a wide spectrum of things.
Phase 4: Diffused efforts always tend to undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place.
Interesting! That's why he calls it a paradox. It doesn't really make sense. You start out with great clarity of purpose, and as that goes on to its logical conclusion, surprisingly, it ends up that the very clarity that you had undermines the success that has come to you. Curiously then, success begins to be a catalyst for failure.
That may be a huge overstatement. But yet, there is an element of truth in it. If we really think about it, sometimes success itself can become the goal, the thing that pushed us. We forget how it is that we got there in the first place and lose sight of the basics. This then begs the question: what do we do about this? When we get into that sort of trap, then failure is the logical conclusion and inevitable.
Jim Collins wrote a book called 'How The Mighty Fall.' One of the key things he says is that there is "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 as we look at ourselves as individuals and take stock of where we are. What are those 5 stages of decline?
· Stage 1: Hubris Born of Success. There's a sense of arrogant neglect – it's almost as if we know too much and we can never fall.
· Stage 2: Undisciplined Pursuit of More. Pursuing the next thing out of ambition, creativity, or even fear that we may lose what we have.
· Stage 3: A Denial of Risk and Peril. Tuning out clues about the decline, not seeing it. You don't want to see it, maybe.
· Stage 4: Grasping For Salvation. Make big bold moves rather than solid progress. Try and innovate and be creative without saying, "Is this what I really need to put back in or pour my energies into?"
· Stage 5: Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death. We run out of options.
All of us can get caught in this kind of rut, where we've started out being very successful, doing the things that we were 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 or zeal about the things that I am doing. I look around and see that I've done some good things, been looked on as being successful. But deep inside, I really don't think of myself like that."
Greg McKeown adds, "The prize of a dream job is to be able to say 'No' to the many good parallels that you may encounter." there are so many good parallel paths that are not really the 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? Three suggestions:
1. Use more extreme criteria. It's like when we go to our closet and say: is there a chance that I will get to wear this someday in the future? We look at all the clothes that we have, and there are plenty of them. When we ask that question, then the immediate thought is, "Of course I would. I would wear this someday." But, if we change the question and say, "Do I absolutely love this particular shirt or trousers?" 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 different questions. What am I deeply passionate about? What really taps my talent? What meets a significant need in the world? If we can answer this, then we can narrow down our options and look at good things, looking at the highest points of contribution in our life.
2. Ask, "What is essential?" and eliminate the rest. Eliminate the non-essentials from your life. 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-intentioned ideas that continue to pile up, but they come with no expiration date. So they just go on top of the pile. We need to be able to say, "This gets out of my page. Harvard Business Review gives a management tip every day and I remember one that came quite a few years ago. "Keep your to-do list fresh with a three-day rule. A to-do list is only useful if you cross things off as often as you add things on. If something's been on your list for more than 3 days, do one of the following:
· Do it immediately – it may take 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're not willing to do something immediately or schedule it for later, you won't ever do it. Accept that it's really not a priority and take it off the list.
3. Beware of the endowment effect. This is the tendency to value an item more once we own it. This is what I've become and I want to keep it like that. We love to hoard, to collect books or whatever. Ask yourself: How much do I really value this item? You find that you do value it. I have a good collection of books that I love. But every now and then, if I ask myself the question, "How much do I really value this book or that one?" I know that I'll say that I value it. But if I ask the question, "If I didn't own this particular book, how much would I pay to obtain it?" and immediately the equation changes.
The same goes for career opportunities. "How much do I value this opportunity?" can be replaced by "If I didn't 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 get to a point where you are getting thin and diffused, lost in all the irrelevant things that come with being successful. But we 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 have the potential to pull you and me down. We need to always go back to the basics and say, "Is this what I am passionate about? Is this what really taps into my talent? Is this a significant need in the world around me? "Somehow, then," as the author says, "we'll have a better chance of going after the really important things in our lives." and ultimately, that is what our lives must really be – lives of significance.
May I pray with you? Almighty God, help us to lead lives of significance. Show us the things that would easily cause us to be ensnared and entangled, that are really not of any relevance to us. Show us the dreams and plans that you have for us. Help us to walk in those plans. Today, Lord, 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 non-essentials. I pray a blessing on each and every person who reads this and make this prayer in the name of Jesus. Amen.
• Greg McKeown, "The Disciplined Pursuit of Less." https://hbr.org/2012/08/the-disciplined-pursuit-of-less/
• Jim Collins, "How the Mighty Fall," http://www.jimcollins.com/books/how-the-mighty-fall.html
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