Where do you focus your energy and attention? Do you struggle to overcome obstacles and tackle problems, or do you ignore them instead, go with what's working, and capitalize on that success?
My friend Sage Cohen recently wrote about training herself to take the latter approach, and it reminded me of one of my favorite pieces of wisdom from Peter Drucker.
First, from Sage's The Mind Whisperer:
In the past, my pattern was to find the one or two things that weren't working in my life and focus obsessively on fixing them. This was a reasonably effective strategy for a time, because I'm a pretty good fixer. But then, thanks to [input from friends], I have stumbled upon a far more revolutionary approach, which is to not engage at all with what's not working; instead, live in rapture with what is working. And in case there's anyone out there who's not yet a believer, I'm here to report from the other side that rapture is a far more enjoyable experience than the have-not frame of mind. I don't know how or why this works, but I have lived through enough repetitions now to know that the not-working stuff simply unwrinkles itself in the background when I refuse to feed it with my upset.
And from Drucker's Managing Oneself:
[W]aste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. Concentration should be on areas of high competence and high skill. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence. And yet most people--especially most teachers and most organizations--concentrate on making an incompetent person into a low mediocrity. The energy and resources--and time--should go instead into making a competent person into a star performer.
I'm struck by the parallel emphasis on harnessing energy and maximizing success by avoiding problems and building on strengths. I know that some obstacles must be overcome and some problems can't be ignored, but far too often we hamstring ourselves by trying "to improve from incompetence to mediocrity" when instead we could "live in rapture with what is working."
I link above to the reprint of Drucker's article, which is $10 from HBR, but for an additional $6 you can get his 1999 book Management Challenges for the 21st Century, which includes "Managing Oneself" in addition to five other essays on topics such as "Information Challenges" and "Knowledge-Worker Productivity."