Quitting is Easy. Living with Quitting is Hard

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Your son doesn’t like 7th grade band? Let him quit. French IV is too hard? Drop the class. Training for that marathon is too hard? Just quit. Feeling frustrated or detached from your work. Quit. It’s easy. Tired of not making progress on your writing project? Drop it, lose it, let it go. Yah! That felt good.

Go to Google and start typing “top reason to…” The #1 result is “…quit my job.” Don’t misunderstand. There are plenty of valid reasons to quit your job including toxic cultures, lack of professional growth, and more.

But remember when you quit something you have to live with quitting, so you should have a pretty good reason. Because while quitting might feel thrilling and easy, it’s hard to go back. Not impossible, mind you, but pretty hard. I once heard a story about a rich guy who kept giving so much money to his alma mater they named the football stadium after him. Why did he keep giving so much money? Because when he was a junior at the University he quit the football team because practice was too hard. He has regretted it for over thirty years.

It’s also important to distinguish the difference between quitting and taking a break. Since 2000 I have started a marathon training plan almost every year. I’ve only made it to the starting line twice over the past 14 years but I always start the training plan. Last year my wife and I got up to 18 miles and stopped. With the kids’ schedules it was too time-consuming. But if I bail out midway because of injury, travel or time constraints, I don’t think I’ve quit the sport. I just had to adjust to changing circumstances.

Or to take a work example, some of the happiest and most successful people I know have a portfolio life in which they change careers and take sabbaticals in the middle of their careers. It’s not impossible, it just takes thoughtful planning.

There are legitimate reasons to quit something, but commitment to hard work is not one of them. Legitimate reasons to quit include:

  • It’s making you sick: Stress-inducing work, school or sporting environments are intolerable. You can try to turn it around and be the change you wish to see in the world, but if the toxicity is overwhelming, I think it’s OK to quit. Because you bring that stress home, and infect your family and friends. Your health, and the health of the people you love, is more important than your job.
  • It’s a professional dead-end: Unfortunately it’s becoming increasingly common to pigeon-hole workers into particular jobs, roles and responsibilities. It seems gone are the days to working your way up through the mailroom and getting job experience throughout the organization – the kind of professional experience that leads to personal and professional growth. Companies with the highest retention, highest levels of innovation are when people get to work in varieties of positions in the company. Or as they say on the soccer field, when you play different positions, you “see all sides of the ball.”
  • It’s devoid of challenge: The saddest expression I heard recently was describing people who “quit and stay.” Meaning of course, they have emotionally and psychically checked out, yet remain in their job, punching a clock, either for the money or the simple inability to conceive of doing anything else.

But don’t quit because “it’s too hard.” That place where you feel challenged – that spot right on the edge of your capabilities where you have to step up your game – is the place where you are at your most creative and productive. When you feel right on the edge of what you are capable of, that’s where you’ll learn the most.

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Shawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building powerful human and digital learning experiences based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.

Last summer, my son and I bicycled across America with two other dads and their teenagers. We published a new book about it called Chasing Dawn. I co-authored the book with my cycling companion, the artist, photographer, and wonderful human jon holloway. Grab a copy. I’ll sign it and send it to your doorstep.

Your Expertise Might Be An Illusion

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Here’s an old brain trick: Look below. Which line is longer? You know this trick. They are the same, right?

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But I changed the trick. Here are the same lines as above but I took the fins off. Look again.

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Yes. You see they are different now. Ten percent different.

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Maybe you weren’t fooled because you anticipated a trick. But your brain still recognized that old familiar illusion. It’s called the Müller-Lyer illusion. Even when you know it’s a brain trick – a visual illusion – it’s still hard to see it differently. In your mind you know they are the same length because you have learned that the lines are the same, despite what you see.

But visual illusions are different than cognitive illusions. We can mentally adjust to what we think we see, but it’s much harder to adjust or change what we think we know. Cognitive illusions can be more persistent and harder to dispel than visual illusions.

Years ago, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman was invited to give a lecture at a financial management firm that specialized in managing portfolios of very wealthy clients. Before his presentation, he was given a spreadsheet which reflected the previous eight year investment performance of the top twenty-five financial advisors at the firm. Each year’s annual performance was the basis of each advisor’s bonus. The better the return, the higher the yearly bonus. Using the data, Kahneman could easily compute the correlation coefficients between the advisor rankings in each pair of years. So he could compare year 1 with year 2, then year 1 with year 3, year 1 with year 4, and so on for each advisor at the firm.

Kahneman anticipated that he would find only small differences in persistence of trading skill over the years between the top twenty-five advisors. But what he found instead exceeded even his own expectations. The average of all correlations comparing all advisors’ performance over an eight year period was .01, or effectively zero. In other words, the firm believed it was providing bonuses based on trading skill, but in fact the data showed nonexistent, or negligible, difference in skill between the top twenty-five advisors. The firm was clearly rewarding luck, not skill.

Armed with this bomb, Kahneman gave his presentation to the executive team and the response was yawns around the room. It was as if he had reported some obscure statistic which was irrelevant to their work. Kahneman thought the financial executives would be shocked and astonished to discover there was virtually zero statistical difference in their skill as traders, and furthermore their own reward system was based on a fallacy!

The reaction of the executives was instead blasé. The audience clearly believed the results that Kahneman presented – how could they dispute facts? But their reaction was as if the information was peripheral or entirely unrelated to their work. They reacted as if it was meaningless and extraneous information.

The reason is the illusion of expertise, or what Kahneman calls the Illusion of Validity. When we, as highly trained experts and professionals in our field, are presented with information that is contrary to our deeply ingrained experience or way of doing things, we ignore or invalidate the information. We dismiss the finding as extraneous and unconnected. And these persistent beliefs are further reinforced by the professional cultures we work in.

The point here is that high levels of confidence, when highly subjective and only reinforced by homogenous cultures, can be unreliable sources of accuracy. When weighing a decision, get not only second and third opinions, but get them from different perspectives and areas of expertise. Or as Daniel Gilbert advises in his book Stumbling on Happiness, get the advice from people who have actually experienced what you are contemplating.

It’s OK to Rehearse Life’s Calamities

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In my dream we are in a small bedroom near the top of a very tall building. And the building itself is floating, and bobbing in a slow ponderous way. While outside the window, the winds are howling and a storm is raging. We are adrift in a gigantic building in a typhoon, and the building is slowly, softly sinking below the waves. I’m with our children, and they are scared, yet alert and ready. Not panicked, but looking at me for direction.

In my dream we are sinking in this titanic building and the water is rising up to our daughter’s waist. While outside the dark water is inching up the window.

I think the window will eventually burst with the pressure. It’s a hunch, a premonition. I’m not certain but I think it won’t hold long. And when the window breaks we will be swept by the torrent into the hallways and be lost, entombed and adrift inside the building.

But maybe, I think, if we close the bedroom doors in this little room and allow it to fill with the ocean water rushing in, the pressure will equalize and allow us to swim out the window. In my mind’s eye I’m certain this will work.

In my dream I am confident and assertive. Deliberate, but not hurried. I speak clearly and slowly, and direct the kids to hold hands. I tell them we must never let go of each other, whatever happens. I explain the plan. We will open the window and let the room fill with water. Once it rises, we will all take a deep breath, and swim outside to the rooftop. Mom is waiting I tell them. She is safe and waiting for us anxiously. We will do this together and go find her and assure her we are OK. My voice is unwavering, my eyes clear and connecting with each child. I convey no sense of doubt. I am certain, and I see no sense of doubt in their eyes.

In my dream we are holding hands when I crack open the window and allow the water in. And surely, it rises to swallow us. And at the moment when our noses are nearly pressed to the ceiling in the vanishing air, we all take a breath.

At this point in the dream I detach. I see omnisciently, as if floating like a movie camera above the unfolding scene. Annie has my hand, and she has Will’s hand, and finally our oldest Charlie is swimming in the dark warm water as we all escape through the window and swim to the surface.

In my dream, once we break the water together the sun is shining, the storm is drifting away, and the waters are calm. We are together, just a short swim from a beautiful beach. And there my wife is waiting, happy and relieved. There is no sinking building. There is only our calm, surprised faces.

Years ago, my father once gave me a small piece of advice I’ve managed to remember. He told me it’s often those who don’t mentally and emotionally rehearse the calamities, difficulties and losses of life, are sometimes the ones most unprepared and shocked into paralysis and despair. He was telling me it’s OK when we are visited with terrifying visions. It makes us stronger and more able to deal with the unexpected calamities, which will surely come at some point in life.

Embrace the terrifying movie in your mind. It’s just a rehearsal, a metaphor. It allows us to be more emotionally and psychologically prepared when real life emerges unexpectedly.

When We Feel Pressure to Be Fake

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“Vulnerability is the last thing I want you to see in me, but the first thing I look for in you.”
– Brené Brown

When my Mom was first diagnosed with cancer, her first impulse was that she didn’t want to tell anyone. She thought maybe people would see her as vulnerable, frail or dying. I remember thinking That’s nuts!

But it wasn’t crazy. It’s a common first reaction. And she went on to have a very open and successful battle with lymphoma.

It’s quite common for people to conceal parts of their identity for fear of being stigmatized. At work people often hide their religion, political values, sexual orientation, health conditions, maybe their cross-dressing preferences. People even conceal quite benign things like parental obligations to fetch a sick child from school, or take them to a dentist appointment. All out of fear of being branded as not professional, or not dedicated, or most importantly not like everyone else at work.

It’s an effort to get along, to be part of the group, to fit in.

The fear is that if our true identities are known, we’ll be stigmatized, possibly ostracized from people at work. Understandably no one wants to feel rejected. The interesting thing about this expectation is that it’s completely false. In this fascinating study from Yale, researchers discovered that overwhelmingly people believed and expected that by concealing parts of their identity that were unique or counterculture, they would feel a higher sense of belonging to the group, and in turn the group would be more welcoming and more inclusive to others looking and acting like everyone else.

It turns out the opposite is true. When we conceal parts of our identity that are core truths about what we believe and who we are, we start to retract from homogeneous groups. And by hiding personal truths, and socially withdrawing from a group, people around you sense it and begin to withdraw from you as well. It’s a reinforcing cycle.

Not only that, when we start to conceal personal identity traits it makes it harder to honestly and genuinely connect with others. The result is we lose a sense of belonging, which is at the very core of this buzzword engagement.

If we to feel like we belong to where we work, we care more about the work we do. To bring out the best in people, we need a culture that not only allows, but actively encourages expression of self. And the very best bosses and leaders understand this by creating an environment of inclusiveness and acceptance.

Nourish Your Pack First

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The Iditarod dog sled race in Anchorage

Rona Cant, of Oxford England, should change her name to Rona Can.

After being an English housewife and raising two children, she decided life was missing something. She wasn’t the type to host afternoon tea, so she started a business in fabrics and upholstery. That wasn’t quite satisfying enough, so she decided she needed another degree and enrolled at a University. Something was still not quite right. She felt a bit unfulfilled, so she started taking sailing lessons.

Finally realizing she was confusing busyness with fulfillment, she signed on to a yacht crew to race around the world. But before she could feel competent to race, she completed the arduous Yachtmaster ocean certificate to ensure her capability and contribution on the boat. And just for good measure she also completed a diesel engine mastery course just in case the ship’s engines needed repair while far from harbor.

Then she participated in another around the world yacht race. Then a third race around Great Britain and Ireland. And this time winning. Now you are introduced to the kind of flinty, tenacious, can-do person that Rona is.

So it won’t surprise you to learn that after winning the sailing race around Great Britain and Ireland, she signed on to be part of a three-person expedition to drive dogsleds through the remote wilderness and mountains of Norway 500km to the very tip of the Norwegian landmass where it touches the arctic ocean. To a remote outpost of snow and ice on the edge of the world called Nordkapp. It wasn’t even a trail. In fact the goal was to create the trail – pioneer it – so that it could be done again.

In our interview last week, Rona described to me something I found fascinating about dogsledding in the northern wilderness. Each evening they would camp near a frozen lake or river. While Cathy erected the tents and Rona built a fire and untethered the 28 sled dogs and inspected them for cuts and injuries, their guide Per Thore would take an immense auger and drill a hole through a meter of ice. Then Rona would hike to the well he had created on the lake, post-holing her way through the waist-deep snow to ladle 40 litres of water into a plastic container and haul it to the campsite.

This required several trips to deliver all of the water to where Per Thore was busy sawing chunks of frozen reindeer meat to mix with dry food and water, and then set over a campfire to make a stew for the dogs. The dogs required over 60 kilos of food per day.

And then Rona would return to the hole in the ice to retrieve 10 litres of water for the humans. You see, only after the dogs were fed, and cared for, would the humans take their first sip of water. When you hear her tell the story the reason is obvious. Without the dogs in the wilderness you die. Without the dogs you are going nowhere. They are the engine that makes the expedition possible, and without their health and well-being, and rest and focus, all is lost.

The same is true on teams. The people on our teams, in our organizations, are the reason our companies exist at all. And when the boss spends all of his time working, refining and forwarding their own agenda – their own mission and aspiration for promotion, or money, or recognition – it’s the beginning of the end. Things start to break down. Not just the processes and integrity and quality of what your company delivers, but the very people within the organization begin to suffer emotionally and even physiologically.

Remember, nourish the people first. The expedition will go great places.

The High Cost of Conformity

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Imagine you are in a room with seven other people, and the person running the meeting presents everyone with two cards. On the left-hand card is a line. On the right-hand card are three lines of differing lengths. You are asked to pick which line on the right card matches the length of the line on the left card.

The answer is obvious. Any fool can see the right answer. But each person, in turn, around the table picks the wrong line, the wrong answer. Now it’s your turn. What do you do? Do you speak your mind? Speak the truth? It’s baffling that these people can’t see what you see so obviously. What’s wrong with these people?

About a third of us would agree with the group. Against our opinion, against what is so clearly obvious, we would reluctantly agree with everyone else’s wrong choice. These are the results of a series of psychology experiments conducted in the 1950s by Solomon Asch. In fact, in control groups during the experiment, over 98% of the participants recognized the correct answer, and yet 32% voted incorrectly along with the rest of the group.

When we perform tasks or engage in activities because “we’ve always done it that way” or because the person with the greatest seniority in the room suggested it, we’re acting out of conformity. Don’t misunderstand, conformity can be a great thing – it can allow teams to soar, military groups to function seamlessly and efficiently, and allow decisions to be made faster. Conformity is acting in accordance with social standards and conventions. I’m certainly glad we have accepted communication and behavioral conventions over at Air Traffic Control, and the people over at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. (Here’s the audio feed from ATC at my home airport in Portland, Maine. I’m certainly glad they’re not just making it up as they go.)

In fact, Charles Efferson and his colleagues demonstrated that social conformity can present a higher rate of correct decisions, and higher performance in specific tasks. Conformity is how we deal with the complexity of life, the tsunami of data and information we are presented with, the unmitigated firehose of media we are bombarded with. We look at what other people are paying attention to. What they are looking at, what they are doing. And we do that.

But positive and creative deviance is what drives change. On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks, at age 42, refused to obey bus driver James Blake’s order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger. In her own words, she was “tired of giving in.”

Know that we are all vulnerable to conformity. Think of these small awarenesses when participating in a group decision:

  • be aware of our vulnerability to conformity
  • cultivate healthy skepticism towards our own group
  • be willing to disappoint people

It’s the difference between belonging to a group, and simply fitting in. When we fit in, we conform. When we feel a strong sense of belonging, we feel enabled to be ourselves, wholly and authentically.

To learn about how build a culture of continuous learning see:

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SmallActs-3DShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Bibliomotion) will be out in October, 2016. You can pre-order a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

The Busier You Are, The More You Need a Break

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woman-breathing-fresh-air1Recently over here at Skillsoft we did a survey in collaboration with Scott Eblin, leadership expert and author of the new book Overworked and Overwhelmed: The Mindfulness Alternative.

In this short study we asked many questions about how we, all busy professionals, spend our days – when we wake up, how long our commute is, how many texts and emails we receive each day, how many meetings we sit through, how much exercise we get, and even how many cups of coffee we drink.

And then we asked a few questions about our sense of happiness, contentment, productivity, and how much of the time we feel “at our best.” The objective of the study was to understand how our daily behaviors impact our sense of well-being, productivity, and happiness – in our work, in our communities, and with our families.

Some of what we discovered may not surprise you, but one insight might: The busier we are in our work, the more we need to both schedule, and take, regular breaks in our day in order to sustain high levels of happiness and productivity. The happiest, and most productive professionals, take regular mini-breaks throughout the day. And the more responsibility we have, the more important this becomes.

Here is some of what we discovered:

Individual Contributors, that is professionals who are not bosses, with no direct reports, suffer through the fewest number of meetings, receive the least number of emails and texts (although 24% stated they receive over 50 per day), have the shortest commute to work, and for the most part are good at leaving work at work. Only a third of this group spend more than 40 hours a week in the office. These individual contributors and team members also reported the least amount of hours working outside of work – at home, in coffee shops, etc.

The majority of Managers surveyed stated they had about two to six members on their team, received slightly higher volumes of email and text messages regarding work, and unsurprisingly had to sit through a few more meetings each day. Managers also described slightly higher commuting distances, presumably because they were willing to travel farther for their position. This group is getting about the same amount of sleep as their individual contributor counterparts, but dedicating a little more time each week to exercise.

Apparently gone are the days of Executives having martini lunches and golfing twice a week, because in our survey the Executive group overwhelmingly reported the highest volume of emails (31% say they receive over 100), nearly twice as many meetings (many up to 6 meetings per day!), and up to 80 hours of being connected to work each week, both at the office and elsewhere. This group also travels the farthest to work, and unsurprisingly spends the most amount of time on airplanes. However, the Executive group also reported the most hours dedicated to sleep and exercise.

Here’s the piece of data that surprised us:

Contributors and Managers reported comparable levels of happiness and productivity, and comparable number of mini-breaks in their work day to refresh and recharge. And those with the least work obligations suffered the least when they did not take regular breaks.

Meanwhile, we found that the greater the responsibility and obligations we have, in terms of meetings, direct reports, email correspondence, travel, etc… the more important the mental breaks become. Those with the highest volume of meetings, emails, obligations and distractions reported a much greater drop in productivity at work, and satisfaction in all aspects of their lives when they did not take mindful, and intentional breaks in their day.

Do yourself, your work, and your family a favor. Take a break.

Is Luck a Choice?

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Rabbit’s feet, four leaf clovers, and rain during sunshine are all signs of fortune and good luck. The good luck ritual of “knocking on wood” comes from pre-christian rituals in which it was considered important to invoke the powerful and benign influence of the tree gods.

Cats throughout history have been both powerful and good (ancient Egypt), and powerful and bad (medieval England). In the 1560’s in Lincolnshire England, the story goes that a father and son chased a black cat into an alley, and then threw stones at it before it escaped to the home of a nearby woman suspected of being a witch. The next day they returned to discover the woman limping with bruised legs, presumably from the stones the night prior. Thereafter it was believed witches could transform into black cats.

When a ladder is propped up against a wall a natural triangle is formed, symbolic of the holy Trinity. To walk under the ladder would break the Trinity, and therefore bring ill fortune. Yet numerous experiments demonstrate such superstitions have no real worldly effect. (Unless of course some higher power is influencing you – just watch BF Skinner get a pigeon to turn in circles in less than 60 seconds.)

In his book The Luck Factor, Richard Wiseman describes luck in terms of choice. In his research working with more than 400 individuals, he found several key attributes of those who describe themselves as “lucky”:

  • They create opportunities for uncertainty and embrace change. They are creative and curious. Wiseman has a fun game in which participants write down six activities or experiences they have not tried but would be willing to try, then roll a die and do the activity that corresponds to the outcome. This game reinforces our willingness to try something new.
  • They make good decisions without consciously knowing why or how they did. Those who describe themselves as lucky make better gut decisions. Intuition-driven decision making seems impossible to control, yet Wiseman discovered those lucky decision makers actually spent more time reflecting and meditating on the decision once considered, and spent more time envisioning hypothetical circumstances in which they may have to make decisions. So when the situation arose, those who were “lucky” were actually better prepared to make a decision in the moment.
  • They have dreams and ambitions that have a knack of coming true. Lucky people expect the best outcomes, despite any negative past experiences, whereas unlucky people allow past negative events to dictate future expectations. The lucky people also described their expectations of upcoming interactions with other people as generally positive. That is, they anticipate their own good fortune.
  • They turn their bad fortune into good luck or opportunity. Wiseman describes two primary ways people turn bad luck into good luck. Basically they interpret the bad as “could have been much worse.” And when they reflect on past events, they spend a greater amount of time visualizing and selectively remembering the positive. In other words, the bad wasn’t all that bad, and the good was pretty great.

You too can create your own luck. People who consider themselves lucky put themselves in the position of having chance encounters that lead to interesting new possibilities and opportunities, see the upside of the experience, and harness the power of curiosity to be creative. Good luck!
Start one small act at a time. Try our course Small Acts of Leadership to build action into your life every single day.

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Our company Mindscaling, is busy building powerful human and digital learning experiences for companies of all sizes. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? I love to work with groups large and small. Let’s talk.

Last summer, my son and I bicycled across America with two other dads and their teenagers. We published a new book about it called Chasing Dawn. I co-authored the book with my cycling companion, the artist, photographer, and wonderful human jon holloway. Buy a copy. I’ll sign it and send it to your doorstep.

Dreaded Conversations…And Avoiding Being One Yourself

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two-women-talking_2Slydial is the app that lets you go straight to voicemail, safe from the possibility that someone might actually answer your call.

One reason Slydial exists is because of the energy vampires in the world. Those people you dread talking to because they leave you depleted, bummed out, frustrated, or annoyed with every conversation. However hopeful you remain, they will figure out how to suck the energy from the conversation. Sure, maybe you use Slydial because you just don’t have the time for a conversation and texting would get lost in translation. But I don’t think that’s the biggest reason it’s so popular.

One of the greatest predictors of your effectiveness, happiness, and success in your work is your capacity to be an energizer, instead of an energy vampire. According to Rob Cross at the University of Virginia, your ability to create energy in the workplace, and with your colleagues around you, is more powerful a predictor of your success over other criteria, including your function, title, department, expertise, seniority, knowledge, intelligence… These are all descriptors. Creating energy is a behavior, and it can be learned.

Think about that for a second, and then ask yourself, “When people leave an interaction with me, do they leave feeling more or less energized?”

Here are a few ways you can make sure you create and magnify energy, instead of draining those around you:

Energizers are present
Creating energy does not require you be an extrovert. It does not mean you need to jump up and down, or stand on a chair and cheer, or high-five your colleagues. It simply means you possess the ability to see opportunities as others describe them, and reiterate those ideas back in a way that conveys you truly understood them.

Energizers open possibilities
Energizers possess the ability to ask provocative questions that open up possibilities and encourage pursuit of action. It means being present and engaged in each conversation. It means building contagious enthusiasm in a constructive way, with emotional fluency. Opening possibilities is about giving those around you the creative latitude to explore ideas that perhaps fall outside of usual organizational boundaries.

Energizers follow through
When we get enthusiastic about something it can be infectious. But remember the difference between enthusiasm and action. There’s nothing more de-energizing than walking away from a meeting feeling fired-up, work diligently on a shared vision, then only to return and find your colleague hasn’t done anything. Energizers follow through on their promises, and consistently demonstrate do-ability of a project by actively contributing.

Energizers add value instead of topping others
I’m sure you have been in a meeting before in which an idea is tossed around. And each person in turn, is trying to outdo the others to look smarter. This is not adding value, this is called topping someone else. This behavior is when you try to sound smarter and more important than someone else and begin to compete, instead of contributing to the conversation. So when someone says, “We went to New York for our vacation.” And then you say, “Oh, we went to Spain.” That’s not building value, that’s trying to top someone else’s contribution.

Energizers use supportive questions
A supportive assertion is when you say, “That’s great!” or “So cool. Love it!” But a supportive question encourages and deepens the conversation. So the next time someone mentions they went to New York for a vacation trying asking, “Wow, that sounds wonderful. What was the most exciting part of the trip for your family?”

You are Successful. But Distracted. Possibly Bored. What Happened?

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You are successful. You worked hard for years with laser focus developing unique and sought-after expertise that no one else could quite replicate at your company. It paid off. You are highly valued. People ask your opinion. They invite you to join projects. They buy you drinks.

But lately you are distracted, almost bored. It’s not that you don’t have lots of projects going on. You do. Actually a ton of interesting people and projects keep arriving at your feet. They are all fascinating and exciting, and brimming with opportunity. For five minutes.

The problem is they aren’t your projects. They are someone else’s. And while their enthusiasm is contagious and fun, in the end it’s their project, not yours. And for that reason the buzz doesn’t last. You became sought-after and valuable because of your unique and unparalleled expertise. And that success has brought opportunity. And those opportunities have created distractions which leave you unfocused, drifting, and wondering when you can get back to what you love. Which is hard to do since all of these enticing opportunities keep presenting themselves.

Only Do What Only You Can Do: You became passionate, and excellent, and sought-after, by focusing the bulk of your time on only doing what only you can do. In other words, taking on the kinds of projects and challenges that you are uniquely predisposed to do.

Let’s take a few tips from choice expert, Sheena Iyengar, on how to bring some discipline to your decisions.

Step 1: Write down all of the things that you do in a given work week. What is extraneous, redundant, or can be offloaded to someone more qualified? According to Sheena, it should be at least 50%, ideally 75%.

Step 2: Of what’s left on the list, ask yourself, “When I work on this task do I experience greater frustration or greater joy or reward to others upon accomplishing it?” Of those items high in frustration, you want to 1. do quickly 2. offload, or 3. just stop doing. Because remember that tasks you find frustrating, someone else finds easy or rewarding.

Step 3: What’s left should be tasks in which you create greater value than frustration, produce greater joy than pain, and build greater value than distraction. Categorize them by type of task. Ah, you just learned something about the types of things you do.

Step 4: Finally, of what’s left in the high impact, high value, high reward, low frustration category, ask yourself, “Am I the most qualified person available to be doing this?”

You have now arrived at Only Do What Only You Can Do. In this place you have found the intersection of skill, passion, and impact. In this place you love your work, learn quickly and deliver high value to the team around you. In this place you can recapture your mojo.

But this does not give you license to become a prima donna, or shirk shared obligations. There are always chores that need to be done by any team, and you likely have specific deliverables that make you yawn every week. Step up. Lean in. It’s what keeps the trains running.

My suggestion is to remember what made you valuable in the first place, and not lose sight of honing that expertise.

Start one small act at a time. Try our course Small Acts of Leadership to build action into your life every single day.

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Our company Mindscaling, is busy building powerful human and digital learning experiences for companies of all sizes. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? I love to work with groups large and small. Let’s talk.

Last summer, my son and I bicycled across America with two other dads and their teenagers. We published a new book about it called Chasing Dawn. I co-authored the book with my cycling companion, the artist, photographer, and wonderful human jon holloway. Buy a copy. I’ll sign it and send it to your doorstep.