Inertia: Clinging to the Status Quo

For all its imperfections—its nagging discomforts, its mediocrity, its lack of progress or promise—the present state of things is at least familiar. It is usually nonfatal, and usually doesn't upset anyone, so we ride it out. But the reluctance to rock the boat can create a dry, visionless conformity.

In the 1950s, Polish psychologist Solomon Asch published studies of this phenomenon that have become classics in their field. Asch showed three lines of different lengths, lines A, B, and C, to a group of people. He then showed them a fourth line (pictured at left in Figure 10.1) and asked them which of the first three it was similar to in length.

It was a simple question, with no tricks or illusions. Among the control group, in which subjects relied solely on their own perceptions, only 1 percent got the answer wrong. The answer, of course, is C. But when the participants were placed in a group whose other members had all been told to give the same wrong answer, 37 percent chose to go against their convictions and go with the majority opinion, which they knew to be wrong.

We're social animals. We care about what other people think. But Asch's experiment is an important lesson for all of us about the danger of caring to the point where we lose sight of what Bill George (see Chapter 7) calls our “True North.” Sometimes doing what's best for ourselves, and for our organizations, requires us to buck the trend. At worst, the status quo can create toxic absurdity that runs counter to every organizational goal. Remember Tal's story from Chapter 7, about the company full of people who preferred lying to their CEO constantly, rather than suffer his wrath?

It would be disingenuous to claim you don't care what other people think, and it's not really possible to live and work as if you don't. We work with people in our program to accept that it does matter what other people think, especially the people closest to you—but also to understand and evaluate views that conflict with their own, to filter through the noise, and to chart a course for change.

Overwork: So Much to Do, So Little Time

“Happiness is determined by factors like your health, your family relationships and friendships, and above all by feeling that you are in control of how you spend your time.”

—Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize–winning psychologist²

Probably the number one reason given for why people don't make a change they acknowledge as healthy or productive is that they don't have enough time. They're simply too busy.

We mentioned this briefly in our discussion of mindfulness and flow in Chapter 6, but it's worth repeating: Just because you're busy doesn't mean you're doing anything meaningful or productive. Without an awareness of exactly how we're spending our time, we can easily find ourselves without enough time to do what most needs to be done.

A little over a decade ago, Nobel Prize winner and Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues developed a tool that helped people chart how satisfied they were with how they spent their time: the Day Reconstruction Method. Professional women, in Europe and in the United States, were asked to list the activities in which they had engaged the previous day and report on how they felt during each activity. The women listed activities such as eating, working, taking care of their children, shopping, commuting, socializing, having sex, doing housework, and so on. The most surprising finding was that in general, mothers didn't particularly enjoy the time they spent taking care of their children.

It wasn't that the mothers didn't love their kids—in fact, most of them had said their children were the most important part of their lives. The problem was that when the mothers were with their kids, they weren't really with them. They were physically there, but they were usually multitasking: checking work e‐mails, talking on the phone, or planning an activity for later. Even though each of these activities, on its own, could have had the potential to get the mothers fully engaged in the moment and bring them joy, it proved too much when they all came together. Quantity affected quality. Because of the competing demands on their attention, potentially rewarding experiences became a chore and a burden.

The American psychologist Tim Kasser shows in his research that time affluence—the feeling that one has sufficient time to pursue activities that are personally meaningful—is a better predictor of a person's well‐being than material affluence. By contrast, time poverty—the feeling that one is constantly stressed, hurried, overworked, or running behind—is a pervasive and destructive force in most people's lives.

The truism less is more comes into sharper focus for those who undergo the kind of day reconstruction Kahneman devised. To change—to develop our capacity to lead and flourish—we often need to focus more time on the activities and relationships that fulfill and strengthen us and less time on tasks we find draining or ultimately irrelevant.

After he got married and started a family, Tal went through a period of adjustment during which he realized, with some frustration, that he wouldn't be able to spend the same amount of time at work as before—and that he didn't feel he was spending enough quality time with his family, either. He conducted a sort of preemptive day reconstruction, focusing on what he identified as the five most important areas of his life: his parenthood, his marriage, his career, his friendships, and his health. When he calculated how many hours would be required for him to spend as much time as he wanted on each of these, it turned out that he would need something like a 48‐hour day.

It was actually kind of liberating, to learn that this was so clearly impossible. Tal promptly adopted what he calls the good enough approach. In a perfect world, he would be spending 12 hours a day on work; in the real world, 8 would have to be good enough, even if it meant turning down some opportunities he would have liked to pursue. In a perfect world, he would practice yoga for 90 minutes a day, six days a week, and spend a comparable amount of time at the gym. In the real world, an hour of yoga twice a week and jogging for a half hour three times a week is good enough. Going out with his wife once a week is far from perfect, but it's good enough to keep their relationship close. Tal does the best he can do, given his life's competing demands and restraints.

Guarding our time more closely—learning to say no more often, to people as well as to opportunities, and settle for the good enough—isn't always easy. But simplifying doesn't mean compromising on success. Leslie Perlow, Harvard Business School professor and author of the book Finding Time, has conducted several studies of intense work environments in which people have “a feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it.” Even at a fast‐paced, high‐tech firm, Perlow found, engineers who gave each other periods of quiet, uninterrupted time not only felt less stressed out, but they also got more done.³

Increasingly, evidence suggests that reducing the time pressure on our lives, and focusing more on the quality of the activities with which we consume time, both in our personal lives and at work, can help us not only to enjoy more, but also to achieve more, and to grow as leaders. A leader who is alert to this idea, for example, could arrange for colleagues to avoid the working lunch in which people eat hurriedly from cartons, hunched over their computer screens, ignoring one another while checking e‐mails or websites. Instead that time could be used to bring people together, if they'd like, to build collegiality and good working relations—or simply to relax for a while and enjoy a meal in the company of others.

Perfectionism: The All‐or‐Nothing Approach

For the past several decades, studies of one of the most common attempts to change human behavior—dieting—have documented relapse rates similar to those among alcoholics, smokers, and heroin addicts. According to the National Institutes for Health, between 50 and 80 percent of dieters will put weight back on. In August of 2011, Dr. Kevin Hall, of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease, and colleagues published a study in the Lancet in which they spelled out a possible explanation for this: Losing weight takes much longer than most people think. Most people give up on diets within months, Hall said, because they expect unrealistic results that can't be achieved.⁴ In other words, instead of adopting Tal's good enough approach, they adopt the all‐or‐nothing approach and fail because of their perfectionism.

Attempts to establish an exercise routine often fail for the same reason. A person might say to himself or herself: “If I can't exercise for at least 45 minutes today, why bother?” But numerous studies conducted in the last decade offer proof that as little as 10 minutes of moderate exercise per day can have a cumulative benefit, reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease and mortality.⁵ If all is not possible, certainly, something is better than nothing. Small incremental changes, implemented over time, are more likely to make a lasting difference than a drastic plunge into radically new ways of thinking and acting.

In his 2015 book The Blue Zones Solution, Dan Buettner points out how small and seemingly insignificant changes to our daily lives are far more consequential than we might first imagine. He suggests that we inconvenience, so to speak, ourselves more often, particularly when it comes to physical activity in a world that has effectively immobilized us. Small changes—taking the stairs rather than the elevator or getting rid of the remote control—can add up to make a big difference. “It's not a silver bullet,” Buettner wrote, “but silver buckshot: a healthy swarm of small things that make a huge impact.”⁶

A few months after completing the 10X leadership program, Donal Skehan considered this one of the most important ideas he's carried with him. “It's not going to be a quick fix,” he said.

It's actually something you have to work on continuously. It's something you have to check in with every day. I guess my biggest takeaway from it is: I will absolutely do my damndest to get up at 6:30 in the morning—but if I don't, I'm not going to beat myself up about it. I know I'm filming Wednesday through Friday, so realistically I'm probably going to maybe just do 10 minutes of meditation, or something that's my own. It's not going to be the full walk with the dog, or the full session of yoga and meditation, but I'll get my little something out of it, and I don't beat myself up about it, because I think it's so satisfying when you do get back into the groove of it.

Fear of Failure

When Swiss tennis great Stanislas Wawrinka won the Australian Open, his first Grand Slam championship, in 2014, sportswriters took note of a tattoo written in script on the inside of his left forearm. The words were from Worstward Ho, a 1983 parody written by Samuel Beckett, the bleak postmodernist generally not known for inspirational quotes: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”⁷

If the author of Waiting for Godot can acknowledge that failure and perseverance are the formula for success, so can we all. Of course, nobody likes to fail, but there's a difference between a healthy aversion to failure and the intense fear of it. Fear this intense can paralyze us—rather than risk failure, particularly in the parts of our lives we care most about, we may choose not to act at all.

Success is impossible without failure: So many accomplished people have affirmed this message, again and again, that repeating it seems unnecessary. But we'll remind you anyway: When he died in 1931, Thomas Edison, the world's most prolific inventor, had accumulated 2,332 patents worldwide, 1,093 of which were in the United States. These many successes were accompanied by tens of thousands of failed experiments, but Edison seemed ambivalent about whether to call them failures—he hadn't failed, he said; he'd just found 10,000 ways that wouldn't work. “Many of life's failures,” he said, “are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”⁸

Warren Bennis, who studied great leaders, found that almost all of them had succeeded at their life's work after at least one significant setback. Abraham Lincoln, for example, failed in business several times, had a nervous breakdown when he was 27, and lost eight elections for political office, all before becoming one of the most celebrated presidents in the history of the United States.⁹

A mantra we repeat to our clients and ourselves is “learn to fail or fail to learn.” Over time, as we accept that failure is a necessary part of our development into better leaders, we learn to fail better.

The Fixed Mind‐Set

The mind‐sets mentioned above are, in a sense, subcategories of the overarching belief that change isn't possible—a belief that, unsurprisingly, sharply decreases the likelihood of change ever happening.

Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck has shed light on this self‐fulfilling prophecy over the course of a career that has articulated the difference between what she calls the “fixed mindset” and the “growth mindset.”

A fixed mind‐set is the belief that our abilities—our intelligence, physical competence, personality, and interpersonal skills—are essentially set in stone. This approach suggests that we're either innately gifted, in which case we'll succeed in school, at work, in sports, and in our relationships, or permanently deficient in these gifts, and consequently doomed to failure.

In contrast, a growth mind‐set is the belief that our abilities are not fixed—that they can, and do, change throughout our lives. We're born with certain abilities, but these provide a mere starting point, and to succeed we have to apply ourselves, dedicate time, and invest a great deal of effort.

Dweck first began studying these mind‐sets in the 1970s, and in studies involving several hundred fifth graders, published in 1998, Dweck and colleagues randomly assigned fifth graders to two groups. In the first round of the study, they gave each group 10 questions from a nonverbal IQ test. She recalled the experience in an article she wrote for Scientific American in 2015: “After the first 10 problems, on which most children did fairly well, we praised them. We praised some of them for their intelligence: ‘Wow…that’s a really good score. You must be smart at this.' We commended others for their process: ‘Wow…that’s a really good score. You must have worked really hard.'”¹⁰

In later rounds of the studies, Dweck and her colleagues found that kids who were earlier praised for their intelligence tended to shy away from more challenging assignments; they wanted easy ones instead, ones more likely to earn them praise for their intelligence. They became more easily discouraged, doubting their ability, and their scores—even on easier assignments—declined in comparison with previous results. The kids praised for working hard, on the other hand, tended to gain confidence, even when confronted with harder questions, and their performance improved markedly on the problems that followed.

As Dweck explained in a 2007 interview with New York magazine: “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control. They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child's control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”¹¹

In a 2008 article in the New York Times, Dweck told the story of how Scott Forstall, senior vice president of Apple in charge of iPhone software, contacted her to tell her of something he'd done after reading her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Forstall summoned several superstars from various departments to work on his next project, whose details he couldn't reveal to them. Instead he promised them the opportunity “to make mistakes and struggle, but eventually…do something that we'll remember the rest of our lives.” Only people who immediately jumped at the challenge ended up on Forstall's team. “It was his intuition,” Dweck said, “that he wanted people who valued stretching themselves over being king of their particular hill.”¹²

The fixed mind‐set is a trap people most often fall into when attempting to apply the strengths‐based approach, and they confuse the fact that they have natural talent with the idea that those talents are inalterable. The strengths‐based approach requires a growth mind‐set: We grow a great deal more when we apply efforts using our personal strengths, and we bring out the best in others when we encourage this kind of growth.

The growth mind‐set recognizes that big changes aren't the result of innate gifts. They result from action, from doing something, failing, and trying again and again.