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All your enemies want you distracted and unfocused.

The first step is learning to recognize what is a distraction, and what should be your focus.  A wise man told me years ago to change my language from “I’m too busy to ____” to “I’m not prioritizing ____ now.”  For example, “I’m too busy to finish my book on Anger” is actually “I’m not prioritizing my book on Anger now.”  This does two things for you.  First, it’s easier to identify what deserves focus and energy.  Second, you’ll recognize when you’re making excuses, and excuses are often lies we tell ourselves.

We’re quick to blame externals for distracting us. The uncomfortable truth is that we’re distracted because in the moment it is preferable to what we should be focusing on.  Being distracted begins with our unsettled emotional state.

Next, settle in your mind WHY you want to build strong powers of concentration.  Given enough time I can get a basketball through the hoop.  But can I do it in the crucial seconds of a basketball game, with a defender in my face?  The goal of practicing in ways which sharpen your focus and sustained concentration is the ability to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done.  We should want to be that mature man or woman.

Here are practices which begin with you:

Reading hard material – especially books – builds your focus muscles.  Distracting thoughts will surface. Keep a notepad handy to jot down an idea or question, then set it aside for follow-through later. 

Meditation focused on your breathing.  Apps like Headspace and Oak are a big help to develop this practice.

Memorize verses, poems, song lyrics, and paragraphs from books or speeches.  Successful memorization requires repetition and intensity which build focus power.

“Keep your butt in the chair.”  This was the best advice my major professor gave me in grad school when I was struggling to finish my dissertation.  Set a timer for 20 or 30 minutes (increase to 90 minutes as you’re able), put it where you can’t see it, and work until it goes off.  When you feel distracted or antsy, preach to yourself: “I am doing this now.”  Many people are successful using the Pomodoro technique to structure work and breaks.

Pick a game or sport or skill that’s hard but has a satisfying outcome.  As you practice it and get frustrated, resist-resist-resist the temptation to stop.  For example, a few months ago I started doing Sudoku puzzles.  I can do the medium and hard puzzles now but I must sustain my concentration for 20+ minutes.  They start out fine, then I will struggle for a while in the middle without making much progress.  This is a good struggle. I’m building my ability to concentrate through an uncomfortable stretch.

There are also opportunities to practice within the events of the day:

Dull meeting or presentation?  Intentionally focus on the content with the goal of being able to reproduce it yourself.  Or consciously decide how you would do it better, or build on what’s been shared.  Imagine yourself doing this with a group of people later.

Have only one window open (or at least only one visible) when working online.  You’re wired to be attracted by movement and changes in the adjacent spaces.  

Exercise without the help of music.  This enhances your ability to manage your own rhythms be more aware of your internals. Press forward through the “it hurts I want to stop” phase using your mental toughness. 

Waiting?  Work systematically through all your senses – sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell – to be fully present in the moment.

I hope you find these helpful for building up your strength and maturity.

The primary definition of a vice is an immoral or degrading practice or habit.  Today I want to discuss the secondary definition: “a fault, a negative character trait, a defect, an infirmity, or a bad or unhealthy habit.”

You’ll frequently hear language about strengths and weaknesses.  That’s appropriate for polite company.  You can find abundant advice about building on your strengths and mitigating weaknesses.

When you’re in serious self-talk, categorize them as vices – those habits which limit your growth & productivity, which are poor responses to fear or boredom. 

When you name them harshly, you’re more likely to take action to stop them. Be harder on yourself than others will be.

Isaac Newton exploited his quarantine from the 1665-1666 London plague to work on his magnum opus, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, in which he codified laws of motion.  His third law states:

“When one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body.”

This law is also true in a general way about human behavior.  When you raise your voice or vigorously push an idea, people naturally tend to raise their own voice, push back, raise defensive shields.  Returning like for like is rarely a long-term solution, and often escalates tensions.  This is why we have ancient wisdom such as the proverb, “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.”

In processes, business models, even government models, if your mindset is “destroy” or “disrupt,” you’ve instantly stimulated an equal and opposite force.  People will be motivated to disrupt you back.  You will find yourself facing greater complexity than before.  You engender bitterness and resentment.

It’s healthier and more productive to adopt the mindset of “transform.”  All change is difficult. There will be resistance factors for all changes because the status quo has significant power.  Focus your transforming efforts to create value that others recognize – faster, cheaper, simpler, more effective. 

(Note: HT to Dan Sullivan and Perry Marshall who have published notes on this concept.)

What do you do when evidence surfaces that you were wrong, you believed something in error, you were fooled or conned?

The two most common behaviors:

• Double-down on the original belief. “I didn’t follow an unscrupulous leader, she’s a genius and most people simply can’t see that.”  “That threat wasn’t a hoax – our proactive steps meant it didn’t happen.”
• Rationalize that the blame lies entirely with others. “There’s no way I could have known that Nobel Prize winner in physics didn’t understand the gold market.”  “He is PMI certified, so it’s not my fault that he ran the project into the ground.”

The least common behavior?  Honest assessment based on facts, evidence, and outcomes – to purpose to be better next time.

I don’t have a consistent explanation for our frequent refusal to acknowledge we need to change something in ourselves.

Permission to be blunt?  Grow up.  Be the leader who acknowledges an error in judgment or being fooled.  Own your part. Learn from your experiences – there is always an adventure of learning and adapting if you’re willing to take it.  Model this for others.

The concept of balance is over-rated. I’m hard-pressed to imagine a single person who consistently lived a “balanced” life the way it’s described in the popular literature today: constant peace (meaning lack of internal conflict), equal amounts of action & rest, work & leisure, consumption & production. That’s a fantasy approaching utopia.

The biology of infants learning to walk is instructive here. All the sensing systems in our body are designed to report the degree of off-balance and the direction. Learning to walk is learning to use the appropriate muscles to push back in the opposite direction of that sensory input. We learn to match the “You’re falling towards the left” signal with the group of muscles to contract that will pull us back towards the right.

You can see a toddler wildly swinging from side to side. Or when someone is learning to ride a bike.  After some experience walking and bike riding become a nearly unconscious process of small movements. You and I are doing what the toddler was doing but it’s been decades since we noticed. Our muscles are making a thousand micro-adjustments an hour, all without conscious thought. As we approach our old age this “wobble” walk balance becomes a noticeable problem again.

Instead of “balance,” we need to think and evaluate ourselves on foundations and rhythms. What are your foundational principles and regular practices to keep you grounded? What are your rhythms of work and rest, creating and consuming, listening and speaking, being alone and being together? Pay attention to these matters rather than trying to measure “balance.”

There are many tragic “mob behavior” stories in history:

The Athenian implosion

Witch hunts in Europe in the 1300-1500’s

The Spanish Inquisition

Salem witch trials

Jacobin revolution in France

McCarthy anti-communist purge (Note: after the fall of the USSR, we learned that McCarthy was right – the US government was loaded with Communist spies and sympathizers)

Cultural Revolution in China

Khmer Rouge in Cambodia

How did these mob behaviors begin, and how did they end? It’s important to look for the patterns because these mob events happen again and again. (Today’s political correctness and ‘cancel culture’ have very similar elements – though not everyone agrees with me on this.) There is old wisdom which says that the divine spirit may occupy individuals, but the devil works in crowds.

Observable patterns:

1. Sincere ideas and concerns at the beginning – but very quickly becomes about identifying enemies and “purification.”
2. Weak leadership at the outset. No one stands up early and says, “We’re not doing this.”
3. They either exploit institutional legal processes or destroy them altogether.  Also, in several examples, revisionist history and changing the meaning of words became a core element.
4. The first to suffer are the marginal people with less status, family, means, and friends.
5. Momentum builds as people go along rather than stand up and be persecuted or killed themselves. Almost anyone will be accused. The movement often kills those who started the movement.
6. They end gradually. There is no final event. It’s as if the energy and momentum dissipate.

How can avoid mobs in the future? They must be stopped at the earliest possible time. This calls for mature leadership in the majority of adults who recognize the dangers at the first signs, and act. This takes courage.

Some problems just never seem to get solved.  We talk about them repeatedly.  Another problem may hold our attention for a time, and then we circle back to the old problem.

This is when you need to ask yourself this question: “Are we having the conversation we need to have, or the conversation we want to have?”

You’ll find that we often want to have conversations which by design can’t lead to a solution because:

• We might be held accountable for a result
• We don’t like the changes we ourselves would have to make
• There is a long effort required before we would experience benefits
• We would prefer to get the credit for a solution but don’t want to take any risks
• It’s frankly more fun to complain about “them” or “that”

Stronger leaders move away from these “want to have” conversations to invest more time in “need to have” conversations.

“Danger, Will Robinson!” was how the Robot would warn young Will Robinson in the original “Lost in Space” TV series.  The Robot was my favorite character in the show. 

We don’t have Robot around to warn us about every danger.  We must train ourselves to see dangers and respond accordingly.  Here are things you can learn to recognize:

• Naked Assertions: Claims presented without supporting evidence.  These are often phrased to sound authoritative and objective.  
• Catastrophism: Dramatic, existential threat, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it language. 
• Problem presented with single solution:  A problem is described alongside only one possible solution. A common presentation in the 24×7 news-tainment business is the automatic assumption that government or strong central control must be the source of solutions.
• Reductionism:  Presenting the complex and multifaceted as one-dimensional, easy to understand and solve.  The easiest form to recognize is when someone says, “It’s simple.”  Another form is when the words every, all, never, and always are extrapolated to be true of groups of people and complex systems.
• Assuming changing one thing changes nothing else in a system.  This shows up frequently in economic and process discussions.  All changes produce consequences, and some may not affect you directly and immediately.

I recommend you study biases and system errors, and hope but this starting set will serve as a guardrails for you.

How are you defining “productive” for yourself as a leader?   And how do you define it for the people in your team?

This is not a small or light question.  You need a conscious philosophy of productivity.

Productivity is fundamentally a function of input and output. Richard Koch (the famous 80/20 author) points out that the progress of civilization is tied to putting less in and getting more out.  

These are true about you with respect to energy and output:

• Efficiency and effectiveness are different measures, and get measured differently in different lines of work
• You can do more than you think you can do
• Rest and re-creation has long-term ROI
• You have the same 168 hours each week as everyone else
• Not every activity contributes equally to your impact and legacy
• There’s a certain amount of regular ‘stuff’ that simply has to be done
• Consumption is less likely to bring you joy than relationships, accomplishments, and creation
• The mental, physical, and relational are interrelated

All these are true of the people your team, too.  They watch your behavior to get clues about what’s meaningful and significant.

Easy first step: Avoid bad productivity philosophies which dissipate your resources.  Doing everything that  hits your inbox, right now, without favoring some than others.  Finish every task to the nth degree of perfection.  Do everything yourself.  Work on stuff until you fall asleep at the keyboard.

Next steps: Know your strengths and work with them.  Align your priorities to the things critical to your organization and your boss.  Develop the courage to value your time.  Be more fearful of failing to deliver your best contributions than occasionally missing on small stuff.  Time-box and shrink all administrivia.  Pre-decide that sometimes you will be stubborn and more often you will be flexible.

Bottom line:  Be consciously principled about productivity. 

My son is in emergency medicine.  He’s been a paramedic on ambulances and in emergency rooms.  Shootings, car wrecks, fires, drug abuse, emergency births, stabbings, broken bones, heart attacks, and more.  There are very tense situations, highly charged with pain, fear, and emotion.  He might help 15-20 people in a shift, and it’s the worst day of the month or year for most of them. Very often the necessary steps to future healing requiring inflicting pain.  You simply cannot fully emotionally identify with every patient. He’s had to learn emotional detachment in order to simultaneously be sensitive to the needs and give them the help they need. 

Military officers are trained in detachment to assess combat situations, decide on next actions, and communicate clearly.  It requires training because it’s not natural.  Detachment skill is built with practice.  It’s not enough to “know,” because when the bullets are zinging you will revert to the level of your training, not the level of your knowledge.

Commercial and non-profit organizational leaders need to learn detachment as well.

It is learnable.  Step up and out of your immediately emotional responses and selfish interests. Use the opportunities you have:

• Reconciling financial drivers and individual performance
• Choosing which activities to expand, maintain, and drop
• Making the hard right decision yourself rather than pass to others
• Score yourself accurately and hold yourself accountable
• Hold others accountable for results in the midst of their challenges
• Treat ‘enemies’ professionally
• Practice “thought experiments” about what you would do were you the senior leader

Practice in small opportunities prepares you for the coming crisis test.