Though most of us are not schizophrenics, we all have voices in our heads. Each represents a part of our personality or experience—like integrity, insecurity, resistance or comfort with authority, or compassion—and at different times each voice exerts primacy or influence over our actions. Our boss asks us in a dismissive tone to do something fairly simple, but because it reminds us in some vague way of the way our sixth grade teacher used to speak to us, we grumble and fuss to ourselves far out of proportion to the severity of the slight, despite the fact that we are adults and know better. We have a noisy conversation with the voice inside that still resents that teacher.

Some of these voices speak consistently louder than others, and some are quiet by their nature or because we do not yet trust the guidance they offer. Often, they cooperate with each other, and when they do all is calm in our heads and our thoughts seem like a well-ordered conversation among friends: Our focus is keen, our concentration sharp, and we operate at our best. But at other times, for most of us, one or another voice will try to shout down its competition. Then they sound more like siblings arguing at the dinner table: They distract us, hinder our progress and efficiency, and ruin the casserole our mom spent an hour preparing. This distraction is all part of the normal everyday experience of being human.

Distraction comes from within, but it also comes from without, in equal measures throughout the day. Often, we don't even realize when it is at work. As an experiment to demonstrate this, let me give you a little test. As you read, try not to cheat by looking ahead for the answer.

Can you guess the most searched term on Google in 2005?

It was a newsworthy year. Hurricane Katrina crippled New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast. A tsunami decimated the lives of millions in Asia. A beloved Pope died and a new one was chosen. Terrorists attacked London's Underground. There was a lot on our minds and much important work to be done, but none of these subjects topped the list.

Here's a hint: Can you remember who played in the 2004 NFL Super Bowl? It was one of the most exciting, closely contested games in Super Bowl history, won in the final seconds by a field goal. Can you remember if you watched the game? Can you remember who won?

Unless you're a dedicated football fan, I'm going to guess you cannot. But I'll bet you remember what happened at halftime.

The number-one term search term on Google in 2005 was "Janet Jackson," the entertainer whose lapse the year before in January 2004 was still on everyone's mind all through 2005.^[96] Few remember who won the game, but still, years later, the phrase "wardrobe malfunction" resonates around the world. Hundreds of athletes had toiled a full year to become the best at what they do, producing a dramatic showdown between the two very best teams, the New England Patriots and the Carolina Panthers. Around the world, millions tuned in to watch the confrontation, a spectacle that has become a national ritual in America and routinely the most watched U.S. sporting event of the year. But all most people can remember about that day is a two-second flash of star-shaped jewelry. Jackson's lapse obscured the accomplishments of those on the field (the Pats beat the Panthers 32 to 29 on a 41-yard field goal made with four seconds left to play).^[97] Why do we remember a two-second compliance failure during halftime but not the enormous effort and achievement represented by the championship game itself?

Did you cheat?

About our experiment: It has nothing to do with Janet Jackson. Rather, having just read the inspiring story of David Toms at the British Open, how did you feel when I asked you not to cheat and look ahead to the answer? Did it enter your mind as you were reading? Were you insulted by the intimation that you might cheat? Did you read the passage more lightly? Lose focus and have to read part of it again? Or perhaps just read a little slower in order to make sure you wouldn't cheat by reading ahead? People are sensitive about cheating, and rightly so. To casually tell someone not to cheat immediately raises questions of trust. "What does that person think of me, that I'm a cheat?" In the few moments immediately after a small comment like that, those voices in your head get activated, and without necessarily realizing it, you get distracted.

Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction prompted 500,000 or so complaints to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the largest fine ever levied by the FCC on a television broadcaster at the time, and whether you judge the action innocent, misguided but harmless, inappropriate, or offensive, the total amount of productivity lost while people discussed it over the watercooler (or e-mail, or instant message, or the blogosphere) was probably in the hundreds of millions of dollars.^[98] The actions of any single individual can drain significant resources from a company and affect the fortunes of many. Major failures of conduct can bring about the downfall of a company or cost it millions in fines, legal fees, and lost business. But far more significant (and ultimately more detrimental) are the million small events—like that comment about cheating—that crowd our attention each day, activate our inner voices, and pull our minds out of the game.

The game doesn't stop, of course, when your head leaves it; it goes merrily on without you, leaving you to play catch-up. If the passion and integrity of Krazy George can make a positive Wave, one that propels innovation and success, the Janet Jacksons of business can make a negative one, a Wave of distraction and de-focus. Both positive Waves and negative Waves derive their force and power from the ways we choose to interrelate. Our experiment demonstrates the many ways in which small lapses of how can harm us in significant ways.

Business consultant Stephen Young made popular a new management buzzword about these small moments; he calls them micro-inequities.^[99] Bad body language in a meeting, a question asked in a mocking tone, an off-color joke told at an inopportune moment—all lapses in how you fill the spaces between you and those with whom you work—can subtly leech productivity from any organization. Checking your messages while speaking with colleagues devalues their time and thus them. Glancing at your watch while someone makes a presentation dismisses his or her effort. You can frame performance reviews in a way that sends underperforming colleagues back to their desks inspired to improve or in a way that leaves them demoralized and revising their resumes. These microlapses create distraction by infecting interpersonal relationships with doubt and fear. Doubt and fear increase the Certainty Gap between us and others. Energy that should be focused on the task at hand or a common goal gets diverted to concerns of politics and survival. An individual or team distracted and without focus will almost always lose.

Let me ask another question (no test this time). In the past week or two, how many times have you opened an e-mail and had one of the following reactions?

Did you forward this e-mail to someone? Did you call a friend or loved one and say, "How's your day going, honey? Let me tell you about this e-mail I just got." Or did your annoyance pop into your head again the next time you saw that person and prevent you from relating to them? These things happen all too frequently in the course of a business day. They generate bad feelings, and those feelings accumulate and take their toll. In business, distractions caused by lapses in human conduct reduce everyone's ability to focus, and thus to function well. It is hard enough to succeed in the competitive world of global business, but if you can't focus on winning, you don't stand a chance. One distracting e-mail or phone call can break your concentration on the task at hand.

Such distractions happen all the time. An inappropriate comment by one worker to another during lunch gets escalated into a charge of sexual harassment. The entire team and the focus of the managers immediately get diverted into an investigation. Relationships that were easy and cordial become strained and formal, and productivity quickly suffers.

Distraction can be quantified in all sorts of ways, some anecdotal—like the loss of productivity one can easily imagine following the wardrobe malfunction—and some scientific. Studies have shown, for instance, that the distraction of talking on a cell phone while you are driving exerts a more powerful negative influence on driving performance than alcohol consumed at the legal limit. Some drivers in one study actually reported that it was easier to drive under the influence than while talking on a cell phone, a powerful testament to the mental resources necessary to balance attention and distraction while pursuing a goal.^[100]

In Chapter 5 we looked at Jenapharm and the University of Michigan Health System and their different approaches to a legal challenge. The time, money, and organizational concentration that go into fighting legal battles are nothing but distraction. People go into business to make things, provide services, solve real problems, create more efficiency, and even better mankind. No one goes into business in order to make better lawsuits. A friend told me a story about a businessman who left an extremely high-paying career selling enterprise software to major corporations in order to strike out on his own.^[101] With his wife and brother-in-law, he opened a gelato store in a hip Los Angeles neighborhood to sell epicurean Italian ice cream with flavors like lemoncello with basil and chocolate martini. The store was an immediate success, tripling all expectations right out of the gate. But when I asked him how the first month went, he told me they spent almost their entire profit in legal expenses fighting with a litigious neighboring bakery owner about whether the ham-and-cheese croissant they were selling technically qualified as a "sandwich" or a "pastry," and as such whether it violated their lease by impinging on the bakery business. It was all he could think about. Major corporations suffer the same fate on a much grander scale. The demands of discovery for even the most frivolous of lawsuits can cost corporations millions of dollars and, more crucial, thousands of man-hours' worth of distraction.

Humans have good and bad days, distractions at work and distractions at home. Wardrobe malfunctions happen. Recognizing this and learning to reduce the distractions that take your mind out of the game can make you a step quicker than your competitor, make you more focused, and help you to use your energies more productively. Keeping your mind in the game—learning to recognize and tame both the voices in your head and the hows that affect others—is a constant challenge, but more important than ever in a time when small lapses can mean large costs.

You walk into a bakery to buy a roll. Behind the counter in plain view is a sandwich preparation area, and on it sits a large bread knife. You order your roll, and when the counterperson hands it to you in a bag, you ask her if she will cut it in half and butter it for you. She looks at you sweetly and tells you, "I'm sorry, but we don't cut." You look again and, just as sweetly, point out that there is a bread knife sitting in plain view obviously used for cutting bread. She again refuses, telling you it is against bakery policy to cut rolls. Then she hands you a plastic fork and some butter. How do you feel?

A bakery with a bread knife that sells sandwiches should have no reason not to cut a roll for a customer. They represent one value—bread service—and yet enforce a policy that blatantly contradicts it. Perhaps the store manager believed there was a good reason for this seemingly inane rule—an employee once injured herself cutting that type of roll, a customer with a plastic knife might take someone hostage and rob the store, or the manager, a bread connoisseur, believes rolls should only be torn by hand and never touched by a knife—but no rationale will ever resolve the basic incongruity of the situation. So you react. Maybe you get angry, feel put upon, or feel disrespected. You might yell at the counterperson and make a scene. Or maybe you just grumble about it while you sit and have your roll and tea. This emotional response is called dissonance or, more precisely, cognitive dissonance.^[102] It results when the mind is asked to accommodate new ideas that conflict with already held beliefs.

As silly as the bakery story might sound, it actually happened to a colleague of mine, and it illustrates well the effects of dissonance on how you think. Despite our best intentions, we are sometimes confronted with messages we can't avoid whose contradiction creates tensions that activate an emotional response. The voices in our heads go wild. This is not just a psychological effect; it's a change in how our synapses fire. Studies have shown that when confronted with situations like these the reasoning parts of your brain—normally employed for effective decision making and sound judgment—actually turn off, and the emotional parts of your brain turn on. Dissonance physically impedes your ability to think clearly, act with reason, and make good decisions.^[103]

Businesses send conflicting messages all the time, unaware that the dissonance they cause brings negative results. How many managers say they encourage the input of their subordinates but interrupt them by taking three phone calls, including one from a golfing buddy, while meeting with them? How does it feel to sit in that office, seemingly secure in the belief that your well-considered suggestions are desired, and receive undermining signals to the contrary? Do you lose your train of thought, start stumbling over your words, or bail out in the middle of your proposition, no matter how important it seemed when you entered the office? The next time you have an idea, do you just keep it to yourself? How many companies talk about trust and individual empowerment, and yet require their employees to get the boss's signature on every expense reimbursement or multiple signatures on a purchase order? If they claim to trust you, shouldn't they show they trust you? How do you feel when you have to fill out a form, get it signed by your boss, and then get it approved by accounting before you are reimbursed for a $10 business lunch? How much do you grumble, procrastinate, or resent the system for making you go to such extremes? Do you look to find ways to get paid back for your trouble, maybe slip in a personal receipt or two?

How about the retail store that, with a smile and a swipe of a credit card, takes your money in seconds, but requires you to stand in line for 10 minutes, fill out a form, surrender personal information, and obtain a manager's approval to return your purchase? Are they still smiling? Does that affect your purchasing decision next time you need something? The message management is sending to their retail salespeople is just as dissonant: "We trust you enough to take their money, but not enough to give it back." One might try to explain away this dissonance by suggesting that businesses require a higher level of scrutiny in matters of money because of the commensurately higher potential for abuse and fraud. But trust, as we know, begets trust. Employees who feel truly trusted are less likely to betray that trust because they understand innately that it works to their benefit. Employees who feel disrespected or not trusted by their management and companies are more likely to strike back in subtle ways—like cheating on expense reports or dipping into the till—to get payback for the burdens they feel unjustly placed upon them. The layers of additional rules in fact create the conditions that prompt people to game the system.

The opposite of dissonance is consonance, a sense that things belong together. Consonant messages inspire in those around you a greater sense of alignment to a common cause. That creates strong synapses and makes more Waves. It is more profitable in the long run to send signals of trust to employees submitting expense claims, verify them in a random and diligent manner, and deal harshly with the few people who betray that trust than to institute layers of procedure that send the message that you don't really trust anyone. When people are subject to dissonant messages that seemingly make no sense—like the bakery that doesn't cut rolls—they lose their sense of connection to whoever is sending them and strike out on their own, either physically or intellectually. They view your Wave with suspicion and a wait-and-see attitude; then they may get up slowly or without passion, or they may leave the stadium entirely.

Even more damaging is the profound, deleterious effect dissonance exerts on people's ability to learn and adapt to new information. French developmental psychologist Jean Piaget gave this phenomenon specific language to describe it. Accommodation—the ability to reconcile conflicting ideas—is more difficult than assimilation—the ability to accept a new idea as wholly true.^[104] In other words, if someone is called upon to learn something that contradicts what they already think they know—particularly if they are committed to that prior knowledge—they are likely to resist the new learning. Studies of the brain have shown that not only will they reject the dissonant message, but, amazingly, will feel good about so doing; their brain actually rewards them.

Emory University professor of psychology Drew Westen demonstrated how this works.^[105] He put self-described partisans from opposing political parties in brain scanners and asked them to evaluate negative information about various candidates. Both groups rapidly identified inconsistency and hypocrisy in the candidates, but only in the ones they opposed. When Westen confronted them with negative information about the candidate they supported, the parts of the brain associated with reasoning and learning switched off and the parts associated with strong emotions kicked on. These strong emotional reactions allowed them to easily reject the information they found dissonant. Then something really interesting happened. Their brains released endorphins, the body's natural opiates, flooding them with a sense of warmth and happiness. In other words, subjects rewarded themselves for finding a way to resolve dissonance without having to change their beliefs.

Business in the internetworked world moves faster each year, and the conditions of the marketplace reward organizations and teams most able to adapt to changing circumstances. Companies who subject their employees to mixed messages, repetitive policy changes, or incongruent practices may actually be causing the workforce they so desperately want to be nimble and adaptive to instead become hooked on resistance to adaptation and change. When things get really out of hand, you end up in the Kafkaesque reality of the bakery that won't cut. Other studies of cognitive dissonance have shown that when learning something has been difficult, uncomfortable, or even humiliating enough, people are less likely to concede that what they believe is useless, pointless, or valueless because to do so would be to admit that they had been duped.^[106] Thus the counterperson at the bakery can, with a sweet and genuine smile, tell you that it is against policy to cut a roll, no matter how long or vociferously you attempt to convince her otherwise. For her to see your logic and admit to the folly of the policy would be to admit to being a fool, which, obviously, she will naturally resist.

Though companies desperately want employees to keep their heads in the game, it turns out that generally they do a terrible job at creating the conditions necessary for employees to do so. A three-year survey of about 1.2 million employees at Fortune 1000 companies conducted by Sirota Survey Intelligence concluded that, although the vast majority of employees are filled with enthusiasm when they begin a new job, in about 85 percent of companies morale declines dramatically after six months and continues to do so for years afterward.^[107] The Sirota research lays the fault squarely at the feet of management and its inability to create policies and procedures that satisfy the three sets of goals that the great majority of workers seek from their work:

These statistics illuminate the ultimate cost of dissonance: cynicism. When a company breaks trust and fails to live up to the representations it makes and the values it professes, the enthusiasm new hires bring to the company gets eaten away until nothing is left but the dry bones of cynics. Cynics believe that people are motivated by pure self-interest rather than acting for honorable or unselfish reasons. They create a space of suspicion between themselves and the actions of others—a permanent and unfillable Certainty Gap—and habitually question whether something will happen or whether it is worthwhile. While it is not necessarily corrosive to question things—skepticism can be a healthy response in the right circumstances—to do so reflexively, out of unconscious habit of mind instead of honest consideration, places you at a distance from the events around you.

Cynicism hampers more than just the intangibles of the way people interrelate; it directly affects the bottom line. Studies indicate that highly cynical employees are more likely to file grievances against the company, show lower levels of commitment, and be less likely to believe management would reward good work.^[108] (This last fact is particularly relevant to cultures that govern primarily through carrot-and-stick motivational models. When the power of the carrot becomes moot, the stick becomes the only means management has to achieve progress.) Cynicism consumes energy like a sport utility vehicle consumes hydrocarbons. You can't make a Wave in a stadium full of cynics. No matter how passionate and transparent your persuasion, or how much integrity you bring to your initiative, the cynics will sit on their hands convinced that your desire to help the team is nothing more than self-aggrandizement. Though you may cajole until you are blue in the face, the corrosive drag of cynics will eventually wear you down to a stub. "Cynicism can poison a company," said John Wanous, professor of management and human resources at Ohio State University in Columbus. His three-year study of more than 1,000 workers concluded that "Cynicism spills over and colors how employees see everything about the company and their jobs."^[109]

You don't have to be a passive victim of dissonance; you can learn new hows of thought that can help you to see it coming and employ conscious strategies to minimize its ability to colonize your brain. The first step, obviously, is to become aware of how dissonance affects the mind and the emotions, which we have already done. The second step is to interrupt that emotional reaction, and then substitute one of several strategies to resolve the conflict.

The most common resolution strategy involves changing one of the held ideas.^[110] Say, for instance, that you hold the belief that, in general, suppliers cannot be trusted and must be carefully monitored at all times. Suddenly, you realize that a number of your suppliers recently caught ordering mistakes and, rather than exploit them for their own profit, reported them to you for correction. In order to reduce the embarrassment you might feel from having misjudged the situation, you could choose to review your contract monitoring procedure in light of your new perception. In this way, you turn emotion into improved decision making.

Another technique is to bolster the new idea, thus giving it more weight in relation to the previously held idea. One study demonstrated this quite clearly. Researchers told a group of subjects a sexist riddle and, after they laughed at it, made them aware of its discriminatory nature. They then gave them a test to measure their attitudes toward feminism and compared the results to those of a group who had not been told the joke or confronted about its derogatory nature. The joke group tended to overemphasize answers that demonstrated sensitivity to equal treatment. By having the new idea bolstered, the joke group was more easily able to balance their previously held, sexist beliefs with their newly sensitized notions of gender equality.

When the desire to achieve is strong enough, you sometimes trivialize a conflicting idea that prevents action. A rock climber faced with a fear of heights might find a way to mock or ridicule his fear in order to accomplish his goal. Once the goal is accomplished, the emotions from the two dissonant ideas tend to dissipate. When the challenge to deeply held beliefs activates strong emotional responses to new information, emotional expression can also remove the mind-clouding effects of dissonance. Talking about the emotions helps to normalize them, which minimizes their distracting influence. Lastly, if you can identify the source of dissonant ideas, sometimes simply avoiding the cause of them can be an effective strategy for keeping your head in the game.

All of these techniques of dissonance reduction can improve decision making and learning and help you actively reduce the internal noise that dissonance brings.

Imagine a dynamic and successful young businessperson with a major university MBA and a bright future. Her boss has been entrenched in his position for some time. One day, she receives a seemingly innocent e-mail from her boss about a job opening at another company. The note says something like, "I heard of this great opportunity. Do you happen to know of anyone who might be interested?" The job, suspiciously, fits her to a tee. One of the things they teach you in big college MBA programs is that a superior threatened by a rising young star will often try to protect his or her own position by indirectly removing the threat. Recommending a job at another firm fits that bill nicely. Could the e-mail from the boss, while masquerading as an innocent gesture, in fact be a stealthy attempt to undermine his competition?

Try as she might, she can't get the e-mail, and its possible implications, out of her thoughts; it pulls her head out of the game and begins to affect her productivity. Uncertain, she can't help but forward the e-mail to others to get their opinions. She discusses it with friends, and worries about her position and what she would need to do to protect it: all the classic signs of distraction. The dissonance it breeds is equally destructive. Instead of the calm confidence and trust in her position she formerly felt, now her workdays are filled with insecurity and tension. She questions her choices and spends more time making them, sacrificing some of the nimble agility that made her such an asset to the company.

Finally, the emotions she feels make it impossible for her to relate to her boss in a free and unfettered way. Their relationship becomes uncomfortable, a fact noted by the rest of her team. What had once been a smooth-running unit begins to falter. Instead of filling the synapses between them with trust and support, this boss has just gunked up the works. Communication breaks down as spaces previously filled with trust became clouded with doubt. Political tensions arise, people start bickering, and morale plummets. The friction worsens as people become irritated or insulted, then get more people involved, who in turn grow counteraggressive, clouding the synapses with more real conflict.

It's difficult to gauge who is hurt worse by this political maneuver (if, in fact, it is a maneuver), the woman whose productivity suffers or her boss, who sacrificed the cohesion of the entire unit on the altar of his own insecurity. Perhaps the e-mail was entirely innocent and the whole situation could have been avoided if the boss had found a more direct and transparent way to reach out, if he had gotten his hows right. In either case, what is perfectly clear is how destructive these forces can be. In a transparent world, where your hows are as closely scrutinized as your whats, keeping the interpersonal synapses between you and your co-workers in an optimal condition for making Waves is crucial to meaningful action. It takes constant care and attention. When distraction, dissonance, and cynicism overflow the boundaries of the mind and manifest themselves in conduct they contaminate these spaces. That's where friction comes from.

In the mechanical world, friction is the force that occurs when two surfaces in contact rub against one another in oppositional ways. In organizations, it results when the forces of distraction and dissonance infect the spaces between people trying to work together. We know from the laws of mechanics that friction slows progress. Friction extracts energy from the system and creates a by-product: heat—wasted energy released into the atmosphere. Excess heat makes people uncomfortable. It requires more energy—in the form of air-conditioning—to cool things down. Without stretching this metaphor too far, we all know what happens to worker productivity when people are hot under the collar. We know, too, how much additional managerial energy it requires to keep an overheated working atmosphere cool and comfortable.

Though distraction, dissonance, and friction can each develop independently in an organization, often they compound each other, like in the situation just described, and set off a self-perpetuating spiral of destruction. Small or large distractions set up powerful dissonance that leads to overt friction. If the situation continues to deteriorate, the heat generated by friction will lead to combustion. Suddenly, your energy will be diverted from the task at hand or there will be two teams working at odds where there used to be one in common purpose. Thriving in a world of how involves recognizing and avoiding the conditions that cause distraction, dissonance, and friction; learning to break these cycles when they occur before they can spin out of control; and finding ways to rebuild situations where they already have.

It is one thing to talk about reducing distraction, resolving dissonance, avoiding friction, and expunging cynicism from your life, and another to actually do it every day. That is why I began this chapter with my extraordinary conversation with golfer David Toms. Toms sits proudly atop the Hill of A in this area, a master over those forces and events that could pull his mind out of the game. He wrestles with the voices in his head and gets hot under the collar when he is disappointed in his performance, but at a deeper level he recognizes the potential pitfalls that would impede his greater goals and either chooses a course of action that prevents these corrosive forces from entering the fragile machine of the mind or tames them when they do.

What guides him? First, he realizes that rules and rule keepers are just a floor of what he does, not the ceiling. The officials at the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, the same officials who established and have governed the rules of golf for hundreds of years, would have allowed Toms to continue in the tournament if he had so wanted; according to the rules, he had done nothing wrong. But, prompted by a wise official who undoubtedly understood, too, that rules have limits, Toms knew that he should not. He knows the rules, the cans and cants, and plays within them when they apply. But he lives in shoulds. His values—honesty, obligation to others, leadership, and integrity—transcend the rules. Rules can't touch the spirit of golf, his love of the game, or the purity of his pursuit of excellence. These values keep him focused on higher goals.

It also strikes me that, as individual a sport as golf is, Toms does not separate his personal success from the larger world in which he exists. He sees himself connected and responsible not just to himself and his self-interest, but to his family, his fans, his fellow competitors, and even to the young person just learning the sport who might be struggling with the easy temptation to cut a few corners and ignore a few putts. He knows that, in a transparent world, everything you do is on the record and stays with you throughout your career. Toms seems to understand innately that his public and private behavior are inseparable, and that to live any other way is to set up the conditions for dissonance to thrive. That internal calm he believes so essential to the constitution of winners is nothing less than consonance, the ability to act in harmony with oneself. Dissonance creates internal tensions that others can sense and, like the free flow of information in a transparent society, those tensions cannot be fully masked or controlled. He stands as a living example that external congruence flows from internal consonance.

Altogether, David Toms seems to crave something more than success, something more than just winning tournaments. He strives each day to fill the synapses between him and all the others in his personal stadium with trust, integrity, and consonance in order to be significant in the eyes of those who watch and are influenced by his actions, and it is this pursuit of significance that guides his journey through life.

We all face choices every day like David Toms does, several times a day. To build long-term sustained success we too must learn to take the paths that reduce distraction and dissonance and keep our interpersonal synapses clear. Rules keepers are not always there and the rules don't always keep us clear. We can seek our advisors and mentors, and they can guide us, but at the end of the day, we are all metaphorically left in that lonely hotel room late at night, with nothing but ourselves to depend on to do the right thing. It is there that we must seek consonance between the various voices in our heads, be guided by those that help us, and turn away from those that pull our heads out of the game. The guidance we need in that moment is not circumstantial (what can I do now?) but rather foundational (what do I believe?), and that foundational knowledge flows from values, connection, and the pursuit of something larger than immediate success.

The ability to keep your head in the game is closely married to the ability to get your hows right, to build strong synapses between yourself and others, and to keep them clear and unpolluted in everything you do. If the challenge of living in a connected world requires us to make strong connections with others, we can only do so if we first accept the challenge of making strong connections within ourselves.