We're not well-served by treating successful leaders as oracles. Patterning ourselves after someone else's example and expecting similar results ignores survivorship bias and the role of random chance in success. [1] That said, it's equally foolish to imagine that we have nothing to learn from successful leaders, and Jeff Bezos' perspective on long-term thinking is instructive:
When somebody congratulates Amazon on a good quarter, I say "Thank you," but what I'm thinking to myself is, "Those quarterly results were fully baked about three years ago." Today [in 2017] I'm working on a quarter that is going to happen in 2020, not next quarter. Next quarter is done already, and it's probably been done for a couple of years. If you start to think that way, it changes how you spend your time, how you plan, where you put your energy. And it's not natural for humans--it's a discipline you have to build. That's something you have to steel yourself for. [2]
Bezos' emphasis on discipline is key here, particularly when we appreciate the difference between importance and urgency. Important activities are meaningful and make a difference over the long-term to you, the people who matter to you, and your organization. But they’re not necessarily time-dependent, and if they go undone for a short stretch no one may even notice.
Urgent activities have a deadline attached to them that matters to someone, although not necessarily to you. They are time-dependent, at least in someone’s mind, and if they go undone that person is going to be unhappy. But they’re not necessarily meaningful and accomplishing them may not make a significant difference.
Some tasks are both important and urgent, and in professional life we tend to be very effective at identifying and accomplishing them. (If we're not, we don't last very long as professionals.) But many tasks are one but not the other, and this often causes us great difficulty. Important but not urgent activities are like brushing our teeth or exercise or meditation. There are no real consequences if we skip a day, but if that becomes a trend we’ll miss out on significant benefits and may run into serious problems. These activities tend to matter more to us than to others, at least in the near term.
Urgent but not important activities matter to someone else, but not to us. We feel pressure to complete them, not only from others, but also internally, and yet their accomplishment may not yield significant results. There's an inherent tension that results in a constant battle: The time and attention we would otherwise devote to important but not urgent activities is often sacrificed to address urgent but not important matters. A challenge is that we may be the only ones who care about the former, while the latter often have many advocates. [3]
This describes a pattern I see in my work with leaders, and it applies not only to their organizations, but also to their individual careers: They're under constant pressure to pursue urgent activities--sometimes from others, sometimes from within. And yet if they always yield to that pressure--if they lack the discipline to resist it--they will under-perform in the long run. If you're like my clients, you face similar pressures, and you also understand the importance of resisting them. So what can you do about it? What helps?
The type of reflective thought that allows us to solve hard problems (and to even understand the nature of these problems in the first place) generally requires some time to allow our minds to wander and to make unexpected associative connections. Creative solutions rarely come when commanded--instead, we spot glimpses of them on the margins of conscious thought, and we invite them to join us. This process is short-circuited when we’re distracted with more immediate concerns or interrupted by others’ agendas.
A characteristic of environments that help almost all of us think more effectively is freedom from distractions--and in an era of open offices (or no office at all), shared calendars, and ubiquitous messaging, it's increasingly difficult to find such a space, particularly for a leader whose attention everyone is seeking to capture.
Focused attention is both finite and our most precious resource. Spend a dollar, we can always earn another one. Direct our attention somewhere, for any amount of time, and we'll never get it back. Although our store of focused attention is replenished overnight, we begin each day with a limited amount and deplete it steadily.
The difficulty of sustaining change over time, and the stark contrast between what we imagine change will be like and what it actually involves can leave us feeling demoralized and incapable--and so we give up. But if our conventional model of change hurts our chances of success, an alternative model can help. Instead of thinking of change as something grandiose, we can break it down into some simple building blocks.
"If you start to think that way, it changes how you spend your time, how you plan, where you put your energy. And it's not natural for humans--it's a discipline you have to build."
Footnotes
[1] Survivorship bias occurs "when a visible successful subgroup is mistaken as an entire group, due to the failure subgroup not being visible." From Why do we misjudge groups by only looking at specific group members? (The Decision Lab). For more on the role of random chance (and our resistance to it), see Significance Junkies.
[2] Jeff Bezos interviewed by Michael Beckerman (Internet Association Gala, 2017). The passage above begins at the 7:07 mark in this video.
[3] Adapted from Importance vs. Urgency
Photo by Pacific Southwest Forest Service.