Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence

by Daniel Goleman

a lesson in impulse control,

mind too easily distracted by the least hint of a cookie will not have the staying power to understand fractions, let alone calculus. Parts of the Sesame Street curriculum highlight such elements of executive control, which creates a mental platform prerequisite for tackling the “STEM” topics: science, technology, engineering, and math.

The ability to notice that we are getting anxious and to take steps to renew our focus rests on self-awareness. Such meta-cognition lets us keep our mind in the state best suited for the task at hand, whether algebraic equations, following a recipe, or haute couture. Whatever our best talents may be, self-awareness will help us display them at their peak.

Self awareness of anxiety.

And this is where amateurs and experts part ways. Amateurs are content at some point to let their efforts become bottom-up operations. After about fifty hours of training—whether in skiing or driving—people get to that “good-enough” performance level, where they can go through the motions more or less effortlessly. They no longer feel the need for concentrated practice, but are content to coast on what they’ve learned. No matter how much more they practice in this bottom-up mode, their improvement will be negligible. The experts, in contrast, keep paying attention top-down, intentionally counteracting the brain’s urge to automatize routines. They concentrate actively on those moves they have yet to perfect, on correcting what’s not working in their game, and on refining their mental models of how to play the game, or focusing on the particulars of feedback from a seasoned coach. Those at the top never stop learning: if at any point they start coasting and stop such smart practice, too much of their game becomes bottom-up and their skills plateau.

ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE Larry David, creator of the hit sitcoms Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, hails from Brooklyn but has lived most of his life in Los Angeles. On a rare stay in Manhattan to film episodes for Curb—in which he plays himself—David went to see a ball game at Yankee Stadium. During a lull in the game, cameras sent his image up to gigantic Jumbotron screens. The entire stadium of fans stood to cheer him. But as David was leaving later that night, in the parking lot someone leaned out of a passing car and yelled “Larry, you suck!” On the way home, Larry David obsessed about that one encounter: “Who’s that guy? What was that? Who would do that? Why would you say something like that?” It was as though those fifty thousand adoring fans didn’t exist—there was just that one guy.10

This combines with the brain’s own opiates, which include endorphins (the runner’s-high neurotransmitters). The dopamine may fuel our drive and persistence, while the opiates tag that with a feeling of pleasure. These circuits remain active while we stay positive. In a telling study comparing people with depression and healthy volunteers, Davidson found that after seeing a happy scene those with depression could not maintain the resulting positive feelings—their reward circuitry shut off much sooner.13 Our executive area can trigger this circuit, making us better able to sustain positive feeling, as in keeping going despite setbacks, or just grinding away toward a goal that makes us smile when we picture what reaching it will be like. And positivity, in turn, has great payoffs for performance, energizing us so we can focus better, think more flexibly, and persevere. Here’s a question: If everything worked out perfectly in your life, what would you be doing in ten years? That query invites us to dream a little, to consider what really matters to us and how that might guide our lives. “Talking about your positive goals and dreams activates brain centers that open you up to new possibilities. But if you change the conversation to what you should do to fix yourself, it closes you down,” says Richard Boyatzis, a psychologist at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University (and a friend and colleague since we met in graduate school). To explore these c...

Conversation for possibility

McClelland argued that once you were in a given job, specific competencies like self-discipline, empathy, and persuasion were far stronger forces in success than a person’s ranking in academics.

McClelland

“Testing for Competence Rather Than Intelligence,”

Competence

One hurdle in such a wide-aperture view, it turns out, is the implicit attitude at work that professionalism demands we ignore our emotions. Some trace this emotional blind spot to the work ethic embedded in the norms of workplaces in the West, which sees work as a moral obligation that demands suppressing attention to our relationships and what we feel. In this all-too-common view, paying attention to these human dimensions undermines business effectiveness.

This was a huge unseen barrier to me.

Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer calls environmental mindfulness: constant questioning and listening; inquiry, probing, and reflecting—gathering insights and perspectives from other people.

“Just as I mastered the radio room, and then the ship, I realized I had to master how the navy works.”