Kevin Glynn has always enjoyed being just slightly stressed out. In 2010, as a university student of law and business, Kevin traveled to New York City for an internship with the financial firm Raymond James. “I liked the hustle and bustle of the New York Stock Exchange and the Mercantile Exchange,” he said. “It's a high‐paced, aggressive, competitive industry. I was drawn to that.”

After returning to his studies Kevin began working for the multinational banking firm Goldman Sachs. He continued his studies, earned his business and law degrees, and went to work full‐time on the firm's high‐yield and distressed debt sales desk. All told, he spent four years at the firm. “The skills and the mentorship I acquired at Goldman were brilliant,” he said. But the more he learned, the more he began to yearn for his next adventure. In 2015, near the end of his second year of full‐time work, Kevin—who had always been something of an entrepreneur, starting three of his own business ventures while in college—signed up for our 10X leadership program.

One of the things Kevin hoped to achieve was to develop skills that went beyond sales—but interestingly, one of the first things the program helped him to see was that his salesmanship could be improved. “I was sitting on the sales desk,” he said, “and what I'd usually do is pick up the phone and start telling someone about the market: ‘I'm generally seeing clients sell bonds today, with the retail sector being the biggest mover. This is what you should do.’ And as I was going through the program, reflecting on the way I was doing things, I started to think: ‘This isn't working. There's no engagement. There's no listening.’”

Kevin realized he wasn't fully in the moment during these interactions. He'd fallen back on a set of rote behaviors and had lost touch with one of the crucial performance multipliers we've identified in great leaders: absorption. At Potentialife we work with people to cultivate mindful absorption in their work and relationships, giving them the tools they need to move from this kind of passivity—waiting for good things to happen—to an active, mindful engagement that boosts performance and satisfaction.

Research on engagement has established that it leads to better results, both for individuals and for organizations. In 2008, the organizational consulting firm Towers Perrin launched a global engagement study, a survey of 90,000 employees working in midsized and large organizations in 18 countries. After reviewing its responses, Towers Perrin examined the impact of engagement on company performance. The organizations with employees who reported a high level of engagement in their work, the company found, had dramatically better financial results—on average, almost 20 percent more operating income than the previous year, compared with a more than 32 percent decrease among organizations whose employees reported low levels of engagement. There were similar correlations among other performance measures, including growth rates, earnings per share, and gross and net operating margins.

These organizations, however, were a distinct minority. Of the 90,000 employees surveyed, only one in five reported being fully engaged at work.²

Gallup's State of the American Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for U.S. Business Leaders, published in 2013, contained some grim findings: Among 350,000 American workers, 70 percent were either unengaged (“checked out,” putting in time without much energy or passion) or actively disengaged from work (acting out on their unhappiness by undermining the work of others), costing the United States an astonishing $450 to $550 billion annually.³

What does engagement mean, though? For our purposes we rely heavily on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow, which we introduced in Chapter 3. “A person in flow,” wrote Csikszentmihalyi, “is completely focused. There is no space in consciousness for distracting thoughts, irrelevant feelings. Self‐consciousness disappears, yet one feels stronger than usual. The sense of time is distorted: hours seem to pass by in minutes…whatever one does becomes worth doing for its own sake.” We've all had an experience like this: reading a book, watching a performance, cooking a meal, talking to a friend, or playing tennis and being so completely engrossed that we lose track of time.

The benefits of flow are significant, leading to both peak experiences and peak performance. In other words, being in flow captures the essence of what we mean by the joy of leadership—we love what we do while doing it well.

Flow, Csikszentmihalyi said, is far less common than it can be. In 1997 he began citing results of Gallup surveys that asked adults a simple question: Do you ever get involved in something so deeply that nothing else seems to matter and you lose track of time? The results—numbers that have held up in ensuing Gallup surveys in more than 140 countries—were mixed. Only about 15 to 20 percent of respondents experienced such a level of involvement every day. About the same percentage said they'd never experienced it.

Not very encouraging numbers—but we take a glass‐half‐full view: The remaining 60 to 70 percent said they experienced this level of absorption occasionally—once a week, or every few months.⁴ There is, clearly, plenty of potential for experiencing more flow.

Why is absorption so difficult for today's adults? In Part One of this book, we outlined three drivers of the disaggregated working world: fluidity of people, fluidity of roles, and fluidity of information. It would be reasonable to assume that fluidity would lend itself well to flow—except that the fluidity we describe is turbulent and multidirectional, and Csikszentmihalyi's flow is unswerving and intensely focused.

The modern workplace—in which the term multitasking was born—seems perfectly designed to disrupt flow, to destroy our ability to give undivided attention to things that matter. Offices are often cubicle farms, open environments in which workers are bombarded by conversation and noise. And who in the cubicle farm hasn't experienced the phenomenon of prairie dogging, when everyone in the office suddenly stands to peer over the tops of their cubicles to locate the source of a sudden outburst or loud noise? Because of the trend toward fluidity of people, more of us avoid the cubicle farms, working at home or on the road, with all the distractions of home or travel. If you can remember a time you were on the telephone with a colleague or client, and you weren't looking at something else—the computer screen, your other telephone messages, or a spreadsheet—you're unusual.

In many jobs, constant interruptions create a state of constant distraction. A 2013 workplace study by Rachel Adler and Raquel Benbunan‐Fich found an average of nearly 87 interruptions per day—22 of them, on average, external interruptions; the other 65 self‐inflicted.⁵

A study by Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California–Irvine, and Daniela Gudith and Ulrich Klocke of Humboldt University in Germany, found that knowledge workers are interrupted, on average, every 3 minutes, and that it takes an average of 23 minutes for a person to get back on task after an interruption.⁶ About 18 percent of the time, according to Adler and Benbunan‐Fich, the interrupted task isn't revisited at all for the rest of the day.⁷

The modern workplace—and often, the nature of modern work itself—often encourages mindlessness, a disconnection from the activity at hand and difficulty pinpointing the most important of the many things competing for our attention. As Mark and her colleagues and others have established, this mindlessness can significantly degrade the quality and quantity of the work we produce and our ability to work with other team members.

Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer has studied the impact of mindlessness and mindfulness on the performance of leaders, and her research shows that many people, when engaged in performing a task, instinctively adopt patterns of thinking and behaving based on past experience. In Mindfulness, first published in 1989, she concludes that because the world is constantly changing, we need to be acutely and continuously mindful, actively paying attention to what's happening at a given moment. According to Langer, the mindless following of routine and other automatic behaviors leads to boredom, mistakes, pain, and a course of life that seems predetermined—not what anyone would want personally or for his or her organization.

When Kevin found himself repeating the same sales pitch to people over and over, he became aware of the need for some crucial adjustments. After spending some time with us, he made a few simple changes, and—as you'll see in a bit—his life is completely different now.

The Importance of Mindfulness

The studies by Adler and Benbunan‐Fich and Mark and colleagues seem to present a nightmare scenario, suggesting almost nothing is getting done in the modern workplace—but again, we choose to see much potential for improvement. If 65 out of 87 of our daily interruptions are self‐inflicted, that means fully three‐quarters of them are under our control. If we can learn to be mindful, we can learn to experience flow much more often.

Mindfulness training is rapidly becoming an important area of experimentation for companies—including Deutsche Bank, Procter & Gamble, AstraZeneca, and General Mills—that aim to improve performance at work. Jon Kabat‐Zinn, founder of mindfulness‐based stress reduction, is one of the pioneers in this new field of study and training. In his book Full Catastrophe Living, he writes: “All of us have the capacity to be mindful. All it involves is cultivating our ability to pay attention in the present moment.”⁸

Kabat‐Zinn compares mindfulness training to an orchestra's members taking the time to ensure that they're in tune: The greatest orchestras in the world don't just dive in and begin playing Beethoven and Mozart, even though they have the greatest musicians and the finest instruments. They take the time first to attune to themselves, and then to one another.

Interestingly, one of Langer's most famous studies of mindfulness, reported in 2008, involved an orchestra. She and her colleagues asked classical musicians to perform a piece of music in two ways: First, the musicians attempted to recreate a successful past performance with which they were satisfied. Then they received a set of instructions for playing mindfully, incorporating new and subtle nuances to their performance. Langer's team found two things: Not only did orchestral musicians prefer to create a new and slightly different performance, but when recordings of each performance were played for an audience unaware of the distinction, the mindfully played pieces were judged as superior.⁹

“In more than 30 years of research,” Langer writes in Harvard Business Review, “we've found that increasing mindfulness increases charisma and productivity, decreases burnout and accidents, and increases creativity, memory, attention, positive affect, health, and even longevity. When mindful we can take advantages of opportunities and avert the dangers that don't yet exist. This is true for the leader and the led.”¹⁰

These two findings by investigators—(1) most of the distractions and interruptions we experience every day are within our power to control, and (2) mindfulness and flow can be cultivated and learned—seem to disprove the third myth we introduced in Chapter 3: Peak experiences are necessarily rare, a product of special and extraordinary events. Actually, those opportunities are all around us. We simply need to get better at recognizing and acting on them.

Flow 101

Csikszentmihalyi's years of research, in which he studied and interviewed artists, athletes, inventors, business leaders, and others, has led him to conclude that flow can be enjoyed by anyone in almost any activity. He's come up with three conditions people can create to increase the likelihood of reaching a state of flow.

First, one must be committed to a clearly defined goal: to play a piece of music, to write an annual report, or to deliver a speech in front of a room of people. It doesn't really matter what the goal is, or whether it will one day be replaced by another goal. What matters is that in any given moment, the direction we're headed is unambiguously clear, and we're comfortable with it.

Second, it's critical that one operates under a clearly defined set of rules while pursuing that goal. Just as the goal is unambiguous, so also must the rules be—otherwise one may lose focus or become distracted while trying to interpret them. This is one reason why many people enter flow so easily, and can spend hours that pass like minutes, when playing video games. Chinese game designer Jenova Chen, who has written about the applicability of flow theories to video game design, created a downloadable game he called flOw, based on Csikszentmihalyi's ideas. In flOw, players guide an aquatic microorganism through the ocean depths, consuming other organisms and evolving in the process.

Many players found flOw addictive. In its first four months online, it was downloaded more than 650,000 times.¹¹ In online forums, players debated why they found the game so hard to stop playing. “There must be something wrong in playing the whole morning,” wrote one player. “It has no guns, blood or explosions, but something kept me glued to my seat for a long, long time.” Another said: “For some reason I can't stop playing it. It doesn't make much sense, since I can't imagine why I would continue to play it, but it's almost soothing to play.”¹²

The choice of the word soothing would have piqued the interest of Csikszentmihalyi, who has described flow as “meditation in action.”

Csikszentmihalyi's third condition for creating flow is that the goal we set should be neither too difficult nor too easy. The activity we're engaged in should be challenging, but manageable. Not all goals are likely to help us enter this state. If it's too easy, we're likely to get bored. On the other hand, if the goal is unmanageably difficult, and the activity too challenging, we're likely to get anxious.

It's important to create goals that help us hit that sweet spot between boredom and anxiety. “The best moments,” wrote Csikszentmihalyi, “usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”¹³ One of the foremost pioneers in goal‐setting theory, the organizational psychologist Edwin Locke, decades ago linked higher performance to goals that are specific (I want to earn $1,000, rather than I want to earn a lot of money) and hard to achieve. Harvard professor Richard Hackman asserted that ideally, teams' goals should be ones that we have only about a 50 percent chance of attaining.¹⁴ Years after becoming the first man to walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong admitted that in the summer of 1969, just before the Apollo 11 mission, he estimated the chances of a successful moon landing to be about 50 percent.¹⁵

How do you create the three conditions that are so important in providing flow? We put together a handful of concrete tactics for creating mindfulness and flow—for entering what we call the Mindful Engagement Zone, in which we're constantly orienting our focus to the present moment and enjoying all the personal and professional benefits that come from being engaged and absorbed in our work and the people around us.

Tools for Mindfulness and Flow

In her book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, Winifred Gallagher points out that there is no attention center in our brain and in fact that our brains are hardwired for distraction, or what she calls “bottom‐up attention.” Because of our survival instincts, we've evolved to notice bad smells, loud noises, brightly colored objects, and sudden movements. It's a reactive state that leaves us at the mercy of what's happening around us.

But surviving in today's world requires a more refined set of attention skills. “Top‐down attention” works differently. It's a proactive decision to focus on the things we want to pay attention to. Attention, Gallagher says, is a finite resource and requires us to focus on things that are more positive or productive.¹⁶ Top‐down attention is a mindful choice made by people who are focusing on what's positive and generative, rather than nonproductive wastes of time.

Can we increase our ability to practice top‐down attention? Research suggests almost anyone can, though people clearly vary widely in their innate talent for focusing on what they believe to be most important.

Mindfulness is achieved by regulating one's attention, a practice that can be beneficial if it's practiced for as little as 3 minutes a day. The psychiatrist Daniel Siegel, author of the book Mindsight, is one of the leading practitioners of mindfulness training today. “Just as people practice daily dental hygiene by brushing their teeth,” Siegel writes, “mindfulness meditation is a form of brain hygiene—it cleans out and strengthens the synaptic connections in the brain.”¹⁷

The actual practice of mindfulness training looks a lot like what we call meditation. For some reason the word meditation is off‐putting to some, evoking visions of people in the lotus position, chanting mantras—a practice that, it should be said, helps millions of people in both the East and West become more mindful.

But the essence of meditation is simply learning to focus. It's a practice often done alone, but it's also done in classrooms or gyms, in groups, or with a leader or facilitator. It can be done at your desk or in your office, in a few minutes carved out of your day. It's often a planned exercise, but it can also be performed when we find our minds wandering or distracted. Some use cues—red traffic lights, the beginning of a meal—to begin a mindfulness session, which can help make it a habit. Chade‐Meng Tan, a former executive at Google, introduced workshops, modeled on Kabat‐Zinn's mindfulness‐based stress reduction, to Google employees. In his book Search Inside Yourself, and in talks he delivers around the world, Tan compares meditation to biceps curls: When your attention wanders, and you bring it back, your “muscle of attention” grows stronger.¹⁸

The most basic and widely practiced form of meditation is breathing meditation, rooted in the scientific knowledge that shallow breathing is one of the reactions to the stress of modern life. To disrupt this anxiety response, which resembles the fight‐or‐flight response, we can take a few deep, mindful breaths and shift to what Herbert Benson, founder of the Mind/Body Medical Institutes at Massachusetts General Hospital, calls the “relaxation response.”

Another form of meditation, studied by Oxford psychologist Mark Williams, involves focusing on the physical sensation of an unpleasant emotion—anger, sadness, envy, or anxiety—as a means to lowering its intensity and eventually overcoming it. If, for example, you experience anxiety prior to a meeting or presentation, rather than analyzing the emotion, focus on the body part—the clenched jaw, the tight throat, or the queasy stomach—where you're feeling that anxiety. Breathe into that part. It's not an easy thing to do, especially when the unpleasant emotion is strong, but it's not about total extinguishment of unpleasant feelings or distractions—it's about flexing our attention muscles and shifting our minds to a point of focus.

One way to make it easier to focus is to cultivate a positive frame of mind: Positivity researcher Barbara Fredrickson and her colleagues offered employees at a high‐tech company a seven‐week course in meditation that focused on generating positive emotions toward themselves and the people close to them and then expanding those positive feelings toward those outside their circles. Many of the employees reported that the 20‐minute daily session didn't just make them feel better while they were doing it; it improved their lives—their relationships, their health, their confidence, and their job performance and job satisfaction. It wasn't solely meditation that could do this, however; participants who spent 20 minutes listening to their favorite music enjoyed similar benefits.²⁰

Setting aside a few minutes a day to boost positivity and focus can have a surprising effect. As Winifred Gallagher writes: “The people who are in a positive emotional state see much more—their peripheral vision is larger. They literally see what we call ‘the big picture,’ and not only visually, but also psychologically. They are in a better position to consider options; they have more choices; they can make better decisions.”²¹

After working with us for a while, Kevin Glynn decided to try a little bit of mindfulness training at the start of every day. “It was only about 10 minutes,” he said.

But it gives you a starting point. If I did that, and then worked out at the gym, it would really set me up for the day. It gave me a grounding point for the interactions that were coming that day, and it readied me to be slightly more absorbed in my work—not thinking about the next 20 minutes or the call I have in an hour's time, the e‐mails I should be sending: “Look, my inbox is up to 50, and it should be 10.”

Another proven way to improve focus and absorption, as Langer's orchestra study suggests, is to perform tasks we do routinely or regularly in a way that shakes things up a bit, to avoid what Langer calls the “predetermined life.”²² Csikszentmihalyi, in his book Finding Flow, uses the example of Rico Medellin, an assembly line worker whose job required him to perform the same task—confirming the quality of a video camera's sound system—600 times a day. While most of us would find that boring, Rico loved his job, even after five years.

Medellin turned his job into a game, a competition with himself, to see if he could beat his record for how long it took him to perform his task. Over a period of five years, like a long‐distance runner training to shave seconds off his time, Medellin spent hours thinking of ways to improve his performance—and ultimately reduced the time it took to complete his task from 43 to 28 seconds. He received bonuses for his efficiency, and recognition from his superiors, but mostly, he said, he enjoyed the personal challenge. He had taken a job that others would regard as pure drudgery and turned it into a flow experience.²³

Virginia Postrel writes extensively in her Bloomberg View column and elsewhere about how volatility in politics, culture, social science, and technology is shaping our future. In her book The Future and Its Enemies, she argues that what we, Tal and Angus, call “disaggregation” is a decentralized, dynamic force for positive change in the world. She celebrates Csikszentmihalyi's idea that flow is, in a sense, a kind of play that combines “tension and joy.” About Medellin, she writes: “Responsibility and discipline are not what makes him special. To satisfy his bosses and the Puritan ethic, Medellin need only show up for eight hours a day and do each assigned task in forty‐three seconds. To satisfy himself, he must do much more.”²⁴

Because we study not just flow but also leadership, we should probably interject here, for just a moment, to look a bit more closely at a workplace in which a person repeats the same task 600 times a day. We don't know much about Medellin, where the factory was, or what else went on there—but based on this limited context, we wouldn't describe Medellin's work as what Csikszentmihalyi calls an “optimal experience,” one that engages his passions and allows him to thrive. It looks to us, actually, as though Medellin were merely coping. Certainly, the world needs assembly line workers—but it seems unlikely that even Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific management, would have asked someone to do the same thing 600 times in one workday.

There are more clues, in Csikszentmihalyi's tale, that the factory might have benefited from better leadership. For example, Medellin's improvements literally made no difference to anyone but himself: “Reducing the time to do his job did not improve production,” Csikszentmihalyi wrote, “because the line still kept moving at the old speed.” To have capitalized on Medellin's success, certainly, would have required a thoroughly innovative approach, perhaps one that completely changed the way the assembly line worked—but it doesn't seem as though anyone other than Medellin was up to the task. All his managers could think to do, apparently, was offer him bonuses, but we can't help but wonder what those bonuses were for. Medellin was clearly hungry for something more.

We think a 10X leader, or even a merely competent one, would consider Medellin's own assessment of his job—“a whole lot better than watching TV”—far from optimal. We think flow, in the disaggregated world, is a way to channel one's talent and energy, not simply to tame boredom, but ideally to explore dynamic, unpredictable systems that include ourselves. We think a good leader would, at least, experiment with putting someone as exceptional as Medellin to work on a bigger, thornier problem. Medellin, too, seemed to appreciate this in Finding Flow: “Because he sensed he was getting close to his limit in the present job,” wrote Csikszentmihalyi, “he was taking evening courses for a diploma that would open up new options for him in electronic engineering.”²⁵ To satisfy himself, as Postrel says, Medellin needed to do much more.

Kevin Glynn faced a thorny problem when his daily sales began to feel more driven by process than by content. Like Medellin, he set a goal for himself. “Absorption, for me, is being engaged with people,” he said.

So I turned the sales call completely on its head. Instead of starting with the market updates, I started with: “How is your day? What do you want to do today? What are the biggest pain points you see in your portfolio?” And just by making that small adjustment, I found I was really listening to them, engaging with them, absorbed. It was like watching a movie. You see it sometimes in improvisation acting classes—it's not what you do or say, it's how you react to the other person's speech and actions. I found it to be very, very valuable in sales.

Leading with Mindfulness

The truth Kevin had stumbled upon is a truth that's been emerging over the past few decades in leadership research. Many of our ideas about what makes a good leader are rooted in an outdated and incomplete idea of charisma—the rare, almost magical ability to arouse enthusiasm and loyalty. Charisma is often seen as a kind of divinely bestowed aura, a powerful magnetism that fosters influence and persuasiveness.

Research, however, suggests it's not magic: Charisma is learned, precisely because it's so closely tied to mindfulness and focus.²⁶ Think about it: You're at a cocktail party, meeting one new person after another. Whom would you find more magnetic and charismatic? The one whose eyes are darting around the room, looking for someone else? The one constantly checking a cell phone? Or the one whose eyes are locked intently on you, who seems to be hanging on to your every word?

To be a charismatic person doesn't mean you're invisibly pulling others into your sphere. You're extending yourself. You're absolutely present for others and their thoughts and feelings. You're modeling mindfulness and absorption.

One of the first modern thinkers to propose this idea was Robert Greenleaf, an AT&T executive who began, sometime around the mid‐twentieth century, to suspect that American industry's authoritarian model of leadership wasn't working. Most of history's greatest leaders, he observed, spoke and acted as servants—Moses, Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. Greenleaf's idea of servant leadership became influential, adopted by great business leaders, such as Anita Roddick and Jim Burke of Johnson & Johnson.

According to Greenleaf, one became a servant leader “through a long arduous discipline of learning to listen, a discipline sufficiently sustained that the automatic response to any problem is to listen first.”²⁷ A servant leader listens first and talks later.

Several investigators, including Israeli psychologist Osnat Bouskila‐Yam, have demonstrated the benefits of servant leadership: Employees who feel heard and understood, whose managers are mindful listeners, experience less stress, are healthier, and miss fewer days of work. When working in teams, employees who listen well to each other are more productive and better at problem solving.

If you've been in a leadership position, you've probably encountered a situation where it was clear somebody needed help—and felt the instinct to rush in and provide the practical advice that would solve the problem. But the model of servant leadership makes our first obligation to provide the space for others to talk about their perspective and experience—it requires us to curb the impulse to think about our response while other people are talking, or to jump in with unsolicited advice, no matter how good the advice may be. Research by Tom Tyler, a professor of law and psychology at Yale University, has shown that simply allowing a person or group to speak, and to give voice to their ideas regardless of the outcome, is likely to make them feel they've been treated fairly.

But listening in a way that achieves results is more than just letting the other person talk. Carl Rogers, one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century, wrote with coauthor Richard Farson about the importance of what he called “sensitive listening” in the therapeutic relationship. Research illustrates that active, sensitive listening is good for the speaker—making him more emotionally mature, open to new experiences, less defensive, and less authoritarian—but also for the listener herself. “Besides providing more information than any other activity,” Rogers and Farson wrote, “listening builds deep, positive relationships and tends to alter constructively the attitudes of the listener. Listening is a growth experience.”²⁸

Di Blackburn, of Sainsbury's, believes the work she did on achieving focus—on listening—during the 10X leadership program made her not only a better manager, but a better sister, wife, and mother as well. “I'm a very enthusiastic person,” she said to us.

And I have a tendency to really want to share what I want to share—and that may mean I'll interrupt, not necessarily listen well or be present in the moment…it would mean nothing for me to have my phone tucked under my jaw, doing some ironing while I was chatting to somebody. I've actually weeded a whole garden while talking to my sister, a whole flowerbed. And I used to think that was great—that was getting things done. But it really wasn't.

So through the program I practiced a couple of things. One was literally just: Stop. Get a cup of tea. Sit down and really, truly listen to your sister. And you know, I enjoyed that conversation so much more than I would have done before. But probably the most valuable result was my sister saying to me: “Di, you've really changed. I love our conversations. I never want to lose that.” And now I just love chatting to her on a Sunday. It's really quite heart‐wrenching, what a difference it's made for her and for me.

In her book The Zen of Listening, Rebecca Shafir suggests one method for effective listening that resonated with Kevin: forgetting about yourself and “getting into the other person's movie.” We become effective listeners, she says, when we bring the same level of absorption we bring when we're watching a film, with its attendant conditions: uninterrupted, undivided, and genuine interest and empathy in the characters and the world they inhabit, and a commitment to remaining for the allotted time—which usually, after a good film, seems to have flown by.²⁹

Kevin became good enough at getting into other people's movies, at actively listening, that he came to think of himself as a really good salesman—and with the help of Potentialife and his mentors at Goldman Sachs, he was also developing a number of other skills. “Four years of mentorship and learning,” he said, “combined with a nine‐month accelerated course in becoming a better leader, created the perfect storm for me. I'd always wanted to create my own company, and the Potentialife program focused a lot on skills I now realize I needed in terms of hiring and inspiring people.” Kevin decided, in 2016, to start his own business with his best friend, who started working at Goldman Sachs on the same day as Kevin—and who, like Kevin, loves dogs. Their company, Butternut Box, delivers fresh, home‐cooked food to family dogs throughout the United Kingdom.

“In everyday life, so much is about sales,” Kevin said. “Selling yourself, your business, your product, negotiating to get the best prices and interacting with manufacturers and employees. And I'm trying to become better and better—not well rounded, but sharper at my sharpest strength, sales. That'll be my purpose for the next year, to hone that skill and keep trying to get better.”

“Over time,” wrote Winifred Gallagher in Rapt, “a commitment to challenging, focused work and leisure produces not only better daily experience, but also a more complex, interesting person: the long‐range benefit of the focused life. As Nicholas Hobbs puts it, the secret of fulfillment is ‘to choose trouble for oneself in the direction of what one would like to become.’”³⁰

We can experience more flow working in a bank or a dog food provider, we can hone our listening skills while speaking to our sister or making client calls, we can practice meditation while sitting cross‐legged on a yoga mat or while sitting at our desk, but whatever we do, if we want to fulfill our personal and professional potential, we have to choose to focus, to be present, to be mindful.