The One Skill Necessary for Thriving in a World of Excess Access
In his book The One Thing You Need to Know: … About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success, Marcus Buckingham has a great section on how the most fundamental and critical skill necessary to thriving in this new world of “excess access” is focus. This reality, in turn, has the surprising implication that we should not seek balance, but rather should seek intentional unbalance.
Here’s what he has to say (from pages 25-26):
We live in a world of excess access. We can find whatever we want, whenever we want it, as soon as we want it. This can be wonderfully helpful if we are trying to track down last month’s sales data, an errant bank statement, or a misplaced mother-in-law, but if we are not quite careful, this instant, constant access can overwhelm us.
To thrive in this world will require of us a new skill. Not drive, not sheer intelligence, not creativity, but focus [emphasis added]. The word “focus” has two primary meanings. It can refer either to your ability to sort through many factors and identify those that are most critical — to be able to focus well is to be able to filter well. Or it can refer to your ability to bring sustained pressure to bear once you’ve identified these factors — this is the laser-like quality of focus.
Today you must excel at filtering the world. You must be able to cut through the clutter and zero in on the emotions or facts or events that really matter. You must learn to distinguish between what is merely important and what is imperative. You must learn to place less value on all that you can remember and more on those few things that you must never forget.
This “filtering” component of focus is critical if we are going to avoid drowning in our world of “excess access” and are going to be able to truly benefit from the abundance of access that we have. It allows us to identify what is most important among everything out there.
That is critical all on its own. But its when we come to the second dimension of focus — laser-like precision — that we come to the big implication of these things. Buckingham continues:
But you must also learn the discipline of applying yourself with laser-like precision. As we will see, … [effectiveness] does not come to those who aspire to well-roundedness, breadth, and balance. The reverse is true. Success comes most readily to those who reject balance, who instead pursue strategies that are intentionally imbalanced.
This focus, this willingness to apply disproportionate pressure in a few selected areas of your working life, won’t leave you brittle and narrow. Counterintuitively, this kind of lopsided focus actually increases your capacity and fuels your resilience.
That is exactly right. The world of “excess access” means not only that there is an over-abundance of information and detail to sort through. It also means that there is an over-abundance of choices we have to make in regard to where to spend our time and how to focus our efforts. How do we make this choice?
We make it on the basis of our strengths. Seek to build your life around what you are good at and are energized by, and apply yourself with laser-like precision to those things. The more you can stay on this path, the more effective you will be.
Because none of us are strong in everything, this of necessity means that we must give up pursuing the myth of balance and instead pursue strategic imbalance. We should be “imbalanced” in that the things we choose to do should disproportionately come from areas of our strengths. But this is strategic — not haphazard — because we do this intentionally because we know that we will be most effective when operating in the realm of our strengths rather than our weaknesses.
This leads to two practical questions and applications:
- What things do you do best and find most energizing? Seek to craft your role (and your personal life) in a way that will enable you to do more of those things.
- Which things do you find depleting — even if you are good at them? Seek to carve those out of your role, or if you can’t do that, find ways to tweak how you do them so that they can be done in a way that calls upon your strengths more fully.
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About Matt Perman
Follower of Christ. Husband of one, father of three. Director of strategy at Desiring God. This blog exists to help equip Christians in good works, because that's what productivity is really about.
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Matt,
Great post…I was still thinking about your the interview you did with … can’t remember who … that Justin Taylor picked up, where you said it is not those who work hardest, but those who prioritize best who will be the best workers.
This post is in that stream of thought, with the emphasis on focus.
Garrett: Exactly. One of the factors in answering the question “what are my top priorities?” is knowing what your strengths are. Then you focus on those things and don’t splinter yourself into extraneous activities and things outside your strengths.
I imagine a lot of folks would read such things though, laugh — perhaps with some bitterness — and say “as it I can choose what I do and don’t do at work.”
Any thoughts for folks responding that way? Certainly people managers for companies need to be tracking their employees and giving them tasks/responsibilities that align with their strengths.
should be “as if,” not “as it”
I agree — probably a lot of people do feel that way. Buckingham has a great response to that. He mentions some people who have been successful, and says “some people might say they are only able to shape their role because they have been so successful — for the rest of us, this is an impossible notion.” But then he says (I’m paraphrasing): “In reality, it is not that their success enabled them to start focusing on their strengths. Rather, their success came about because they were doing this from the start.”
In other words, if you wait for the time when you feel you really have the freedom to adjust your role, that time will never come because you will always be on the treadmill. Paradoxically, the way to get to the point where it seems like you do have the measure of latitude to craft your role is to start doing that now. Crafting your role is what leads to success, rather than the reward of success.
The other thing to say here is that people need to realize that they need to be proactive. For sure companies should seek to position their people in a way that builds on strength. But whether that is happening or not, employees need to realize that they are not powerless. They should not view themselves as victims subject to the circumstances and environment. They need to realize that they can take action and be a force to shape their environment, a force for good that is able to craft their role so that it does call upon their strengths most of the time. We should be initiators and not merely responders. We need to reject the notion that we are prisoners of our circumstances.
For the people that aren’t willing to be proactive, well, they are the ones who will end up saying for their entire lives, “I could never choose what I do at work,” and then retiring after a career of mediocre satisfaction and results that is a shadow of what it could have been.
Matt,
I’m with you: that is what I’ve been doing at Southern with many stories we’ve done over the past few months. I’m in the blessed position of my superiors saying “yeah, go for it: let’s expand what we are doing,” but without proactiveness the stories wouldn’t happen.
I was often amused in college when other students would complain that they got a low grade “because the professor wasn’t interesting.” In reality, they got a low grade because they weren’t proactive in studying despite their professor’s “boringness.”
On the flip side, I would say to the professor, “why are you boring? Don’t you care about what you are teaching?”
As a bit of pushback: I think there are many — millions probably — of faithful workers in America who really can’t choose what they do at work. While the factory worker is fading away more and more in America, there are still lots and lots of factory workers who can’t have much say in what jobs they do and don’t do at work.
I think you would agree that those folks can be the best at what they are doing and perhaps some would then earn promotions. However, for folks who really aren’t management quality there probably isn’t much room to move up.
So, for this (rather large, though diminishing) group of people, excellence even in things they aren’t particularly good at, is the charge, and focused work just doesn’t really come into play.
Well said — students shouldn’t blame their bad grade on the external circumstance of a boring professor, and at the same time the professor should not be boring.
In regard to the faithful workers where it doesn’t seem like there really is any way they can choose what they do: I think you’ve raised a great question. So let me think out loud for a bit here and see if this helps address that issue.
I think the solution here is a broader conception of “shape what you do.” A factory worker would be a great example here. The automobiles they are making need to be built, so that’s the task, and this means the doors need to be put on in a certain way, and etc. So what control can they have?
A few areas:
1. Control over _how_ they do their work. For example, Patrick Lencioni points out that measurability is a key component of “meaningfulness” in a job. If the management hasn’t provided that, a factory worker could choose some personal metrics to keep track of — if that matters to them.
2. Generating ideas. I think Henry Ford went wrong when he said “why is it that when I just want a pair of hands, a brain is always attached?” He was referring to the workers on their assembly line. Terrible statement; maybe he didn’t mean it. My point here is: our brains are attached for a reason, and this means that all workers have valuable ideas to contribute. So a person working in a Ford assembly plant can be thinking of ideas for improvement. That is shaping their job in a real way — it adds the responsibility to make a contribution to how those leading the plant can make things better for everybody. The worker can also be thinking of ways to make their own personal work more effective, and always improving.
Those two ways might not appeal to everyone, but they are just two examples to show that we can think more broadly, and that this can be extended in a thousand different directions.
Here’s the main thing, though: The person working any job — whether a Ford assembly plant or in management or anything — should be in that job because it already, in the main, fits their strengths and can _naturally_ be tweaked to fit them more. Some people just wouldn’t be cut out for the assembly plant; they should work elsewhere. But working in a factory requires unique skills of its own — talents. Those who have those talents can resonate with the work in the main and will find it fulfilling — provided that they are treated well and management operates according to sound principles.
In other words, no job can be endlessly tweaked, so sometimes the solution may have to be a different line of work. And even those jobs that seem most difficult to tweak will of themselves match certain people’s talents, and those who are doing those jobs are doing something important and meaningful with its own nobility. If they are within a type of job that matches their strengths in the main, then the tweaking is much more possible, natural, and clear.
One last thought: Buckingham gives a great example in his book on management on the housekeeping staff. Some people were surprised that housekeeping staff at a hotel could find their work fulfilling. The convention view was that good housekeepers should be promoted out of that role and into management as soon as possible. But in reality, many of the employees _enjoyed_ their housekeeping work. The reason is that _every role_ requires talent. There are no jobs that are truly “mindless.” Every role requires talent, and every role performed at excellence has its own nobility. So in regard to the housekeepers, the core discovery was that housekeeping is ultimately about putting on a show for the guests. So the best housekeepers were the ones who not just cleaned the rooms well, but who arranged the kid’s stuffed animals on the bed in a neat way, and added other small touches. So, too often we have an overly narrow conception of what a job is. But those whose talents are matched to the job see the bigger picture, add the small but immensely valuable details, and love what they do.
Is that helpful at all? I don’t want to make these things sound too easy. Your pushback here was an excellent opportunity to think this through more fully in relation to all different sorts of jobs.
It is helpful…thanks for the interaction. I think your thinking is sound and I would agree with you. I, too, was thinking through the topic as I was writing.
I love work and thus I love thinking about how to do work in a way that most glorifies God. And in thinking about how to help other people do the same.
For whatever reason, I have an intrinsic motor for doing work with excellence (definitely my parents influence and influences in college, and, I think, the Lord impressing upon me the value of work done unto Him (Eph. 6:5-9; Col. 3:23-24).
A lot of people though just totally live for the weekends. It’s pretty sad…and should impress upon believers the reality that doing a bang up job at work is a great platform for bringing the Gospel to people (to give a reason for the hope that we have 1 Pet. 3:15).
Matt- Would you say that this principle applies to managers in the way that they lead their staff? Should managers seek to have this perceived imbalance among their folks for the sake of maximizing their strengths?