LESSON 7

SUSTAINING OUTLIER PERFORMANCE

The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.

—VINCE LOMBARDI

By now you have learned about factors that can either enable or derail your trajectory. Through an awareness of these you are already in a better position to reach the goals you have set along your trajectory. To attain your goals and achieve true success you must begin to tie your experiences together in such a way that you will reach a point of sustained performance over time. Doing so will make you a positive outlier—someone who stands out from the crowd at work and in life. In statistics an outlier is defined as a data point that is substantially different from the others. It can be considered as something that lies outside most of the other values. When you become an outlier you stick out. And you can do so in a positive way.

To maintain a long track record of success you must not become rigid with what you know and what you do. This is quite important as it relates to your trajectory. If you are rigid you will not be able to see when you should take a detour, use a wise shortcut, or perhaps even change your targeted destination entirely. This may be hard for you to notice because rigidity is not always a conscious state—people can erroneously think that they are adaptable and open to new ideas. Recall from Lesson 1 that proactively seeking feedback is essential. Along with many other benefits, doing this will allow you to avoid unconsciously becoming rigid and set in your ways. It is feedback that opens your eyes and serves as a catalyst to positive change. What you think you want or desire can change. Along your journey you must continually reevaluate what you are doing and what matters to you.

You may not always succeed at being the best, but you can succeed at being your best. There is a big difference between the two. People expect the latter, not the former. As long as you put forward your full effort you will reach more of your goals and be recognized for your achievements. When you continually persist in doing your best you will over time accrue sustained performance—performance that when viewed in its entirety will be among the best.

As we reviewed earlier, General Electric (GE) is not just the longest-serving company in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, it is the only company that was part of the index when it was created. GE has not maintained this distinction by accident. Sustained performance at any level is never attained over time by accident. From its early days GE constantly sought to break new ground and do what others had not. So much attention is given to Jack Welch and the modern management philosophy of GE that it is easy to forget who founded the company. It was actually Thomas Edison. Yes, the same pioneer who invented the light-bulb was responsible for starting one of the world's most successful companies—a company with sustained performance. The innovation that continues at GE to this day has added to Edison's ongoing legacy.

VISUALIZE YOUR SUCCESS

Just as GE has driven its own sustained performance, you control your own success. It is important to underscore this: You have even more control than you might think. By simply believing deeply in yourself and your own capabilities you will be significantly more likely to accomplish what you seek. You must be aware of the fact that you can unconsciously be your best advocate or your own biggest obstacle. You can use the experiences in your history to your advantage or detriment, depending on how you allow yourself to interpret the past. There is a critical need for you to deeply believe that your success is achievable and imminent. By being realistic—but optimistic—you will increase the likelihood of succeeding.

At this point you are probably asking, “But how do I do that?” It can be done through nothing more than the power of thought and positive belief. Visualization of an outcome is one technique that can assist you in reaching the goals you have set along your trajectory. Picture your golf ball landing close to the flag on the green, picture the crowd at the opening of your first restaurant, picture the new office you will move into when you receive the promotion you have been working toward.

Emmitt Smith stated that when he was in the NFL he spent so much time visualizing holes in the opposing football team's defense that sometimes he would run with his eyes closed to see if he could hit one. Michael Jordan once famously shot and made a free throw during a basketball game with his eyes closed. A popular legend tells of Major James Nesmeth, who was a prisoner of war during Vietnam. According to the story he was held captive by the enemy for a grueling seven years. During this time he mentally played golf on his home course every day. He did not just visualize a good shot. He visualized driving to the course, putting his shoes on, picking up his tee after a shot, the smell of the course. Amazingly, Major Nesmeth visualized playing the course at a normal speed. During his imprisonment he would spend hours at a time imagining himself playing a great round. What did he do upon his release? Major Nesmeth promptly proceeded to play the best round of his life! Although this particular story may be more legend than fact, the technique does work. Try it some time. Seriously. It can work for you too. Do it for bowling, or for the big speech you have coming up. Better yet, do it anytime you are anxious about an upcoming event or activity.

If you are still wondering whether visualization is a good use of your time, consider this scenario: You are training for the Olympics and your coach allows you to choose to be in one of four training groups. You could be in Group A and follow a traditional regime with 100 percent physical practice. Group B would be 75 percent physical and 25 percent mental. Group C would split at 50 percent physical and 50 percent mental. Finally, Group D would be 75 percent mental and 25 percent physical practice. Think about this for a moment. Which would you choose?

In advance of the 1980 Olympics the Russians purportedly tested this by placing athletes in the four different groups. Astoundingly, it was the athletes in Group D who won the most medals. What scientists have found is that your central nervous system (CNS) is not designed to distinguish between real and imagined events. Through imagery and visualization you begin to build confidence and create a conscious memory of how you should react in a given situation. This in turn trains your CNS to follow the pattern that you have ingrained in your mind.

More recent proof can be found in the success of Michael Phelps, the eighteen-time Olympic gold medalist. Although Phelps does possess amazing physical skills and followed a well-documented rigorous training schedule, his coach, Bob Bowman, indicated that it was mental preparation that truly set him apart. Bowman stated, “He's the best I've ever seen, and he may be the best ever, in terms of visualization. He will see exactly the perfect race and he will see it like he's sitting in the stands, and he'll see it in the water. And then he will go through scenarios—what if things don't go well? Like if his suit rips or his goggles break. And then he has this database, so that when he swims the race he's already programmed his nervous system to do one of those. And he'll just pick the one that happens to come up. If everything is perfect, he'll just go with the perfect one; if he's got to make a change, he's already got it in there.” His Olympic success further underscores how you can use this technique and the value of doing so.

In addition to visualizing the best-case scenarios, Phelps also visualized and prepared for alternative and worst-case scenarios. As Bowman mentioned, Phelps was then able to respond so much quicker because he had programmed himself and his CNS to be ready for the other options. Applying this technique to the workplace, consider a presentation in which you are not sure how the audience will react. Might you need to change the focus of the talk slightly? Perhaps insert a few jokes to lighten the mood? Answer unexpected questions? You will not know in advance exactly what will occur, but you can increase your chances of responding to any of the scenarios or questions posed by vividly playing out each one in your head in advance. Or consider an important interview you have coming up. You can prepare responses to common interview questions and then visualize yourself sitting in the room and answering the questions. The closer you can get to visualizing the real-life scenario, the better positioned you will be to perform well and get the job.

BELIEVE YOUR SUCCESS

Through visualization you will perform better and thereby increase your confidence. This builds what is known as self-efficacy, which is the belief you have within yourself that you will succeed in what you are doing. Study after study has scientifically shown the importance of a person's mindset in achieving success in every type of endeavor imaginable. Put simply, if you think you will do well, you will do better than you would if you think you will fail. Research on self-efficacy has revealed to us that it is absolutely essential that you believe in yourself. When you have low self-efficacy you will have very little confidence in your own ability to succeed and reach your goals. If you have high self-efficacy you will be just the opposite: You will have strong self-confidence and believe in the high probability of succeeding in what you do.

In a series of milestone studies in this area, Dr. Albert Bandura sought to assess participants’ levels of self-efficacy in tasks that were then measured for performance. What he found was that the groups that included people with low self-efficacy performed worse than those with average self-efficacy, who in turn performed worse than those with the highest levels. While this may seem discouraging for anyone with low self-efficacy, there is great news. Studies have also found that self-efficacy can be raised. When that occurs, the same person would then do better. This is such an important but often overlooked finding within the research. Self-efficacy is not innate. So many characteristics are next to impossible to change, but self-efficacy is not; you can increase it through practice and repetition. When you consider the implications of this for your career it should quickly become clear that you need to generate successes. You need to do so not only for the sake of success itself, but also for the essential by-product of maintaining and growing your own self-efficacy. By setting goals you will reach them and then begin to feel more and more confident as the magnitude of your goals and aspirations increases.

Just as success breeds success, high self-efficacy begets more self-efficacy, which enables you to better cope with failure. You are able to do so because people who have strong self-efficacy recognize that failure is temporary and success will soon follow. Failure, which we discussed in more detail in Lesson 6, will always happen to some degree. What is most important is that you are equipped to handle it when it does. Another positive by-product found in people who have high self-efficacy is persistence. As a result they are less prone to give up because they know that they will reach the goal if they are tenacious and keep at it. Higher levels of self-efficacy will even lower stress because you will be more comfortable and confident. That in turn will reduce anxiety, which is one of the main causes of stress.

When we trace self-efficacy back to goal setting, which we discussed in Lesson 3, an exciting implication emerges: The more you believe in yourself, the more ambitious you become with the goals you are willing to set and take on. In other words, as your self-efficacy grows so too will your willingness to think big. Let's say you want to learn to swim. Surely you are not going to try to swim across a lake right away. But as you reach your first goal of learning to float, and then your second to tread water, and then to swim a short distance and so on, you will build your self-efficacy as it relates to swimming. Before long, swimming across a lake—something that once seemed unimaginable—quickly becomes a goal you will feel comfortable setting and reaching.

As your self-efficacy in a given area increases, you will also begin to create a situation in which you can embolden a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whereas self-efficacy is based on your own sense of confidence that you can do something, a self-fulfilling prophecy (SFP) is a belief that an outcome will happen because you and others act in advance as though it is a foregone conclusion. When others expect someone to do well, they act as if they expect the person to succeed, leading the person to behave in a manner that tries to fulfill those expectations.

In tests of the SFP, the psychologist Robert Rosenthal found very striking results. In the most famous of these studies he partnered with an elementary school to determine whether teachers’ expectations of students would influence subsequent performance. For the purposes of the study the teachers were intentionally misled and given expectations about students when classes began. They were told that based on the results of an IQ test, certain students could be expected to do much better in school. In what he termed the Pygmalion effect, Rosenthal found that those same students scored much better on a follow-up IQ test at the end of the school year than did the other students.

In actuality, the “best” students were picked at random. Rosenthal and his coauthor (Lenore Jacobson, who was the principal at the school) surmised that the teachers’ preconceived expectations led them to give more attention to those students. Curiously, the effects were most pronounced for first- and second-grade students. There was not as much of a difference for those in higher grades. The authors speculated that it could have to do with the fact that the teachers had not yet had a chance to form an opinion of the younger students. In other words, the teachers’ expectancy was still being formed. They had observed the older students in prior years and had a more thorough understanding of their capabilities. This is a powerful suggestion, and it has immense applicability to those new in their career or starting a new job. It means that you can aid your trajectory simply by starting strong and getting off on the right foot. In doing so you can establish a positive expectancy among your colleagues and superiors.

Negative expectancy effects are all too easy to create when you are not aware of how these things can develop. A student who causes mischief at school quickly becomes tagged as a troublemaker. A minor incident that was committed by a “good” student might cause a teacher to roll her eyes, but the same incident committed by a student who is expected to be “bad” becomes a reason to send the offender to detention again. That student faces a headwind in his or her trajectory. Why? Because the school's teachers become accustomed to an expectation of wrongdoing and are on the lookout for the slightest infraction. It will take a long pattern of good behavior to change the teachers’ expectancy for this pupil. It is no different at work. You must not make the little mistakes. Little mistakes create an expectancy of failure and lead to people waiting for even bigger mistakes.

The effects of the self-fulfilling prophecy actually reach beyond individuals and also apply to teams. It is easy to expand this individual effect and spread a type of contagiousness that creates a group SFP. This team-level prophecy is known as the synergistic accumulative effect. Our behaviors, attitudes, and actions are all noticed by those with whom we work. Not only are these things noticed, but they also influence others. As you have likely seen, all too often a meeting, party, or other event is completely changed by one person. That person's attitude and excitement can lift up the whole group. On the other hand, that same person can spread a negative attitude that quickly permeates the room. The SFP can be used to raise not only yourself but others. At work as in life, the total is usually more than the sum of its parts. Group self-fulfilling prophecies are even more powerful than individual ones. Lifting those around you will enable you to do even more. Particularly if you lead a team, remember how strongly your attitude and actions will impact others.

Just as they do at the individual level, synergistic accumulative effects can work against you and your team if you are not careful. It is your job to make them work to your advantage. To illustrate what can happen if you don't, consider the Great Depression. The self-fulfilling prophecy of a single person would not have been sufficient to lead to massive failures within the banking system, but a collective prophecy did. After the stock market crashed, word spread that the banks would not be able to pay back people's money. Individuals and soon masses of people all began to believe that the banks were going to fail. This in turn led to these same masses of people running to banks to withdraw their money. Of course, banks invest money and do not keep nearly enough cash on hand to pay everyone back. As the withdrawal requests increased the banks eventually could not keep up, and massive panic ensued.

Collectively the various terms such as Pygmalion effect, self-fulfilling prophecy, and synergistic accumulative effect are all different types of expectancies. You can learn to use the power of an expectancy effect to your advantage rather than allow it to work against you, which can happen if you are not careful. When you connect goal theory (Lesson 3) and self-efficacy with expectancy effects, something very powerful emerges. You create a perpetual circle of success, as shown Figure 7-1. What you can see is that each of these will build off of the others. When you set and reach a goal you will build your self-efficacy. As your self-efficacy grows, so too will your willingness to reach for bigger goals. People will notice that and see your success, which leads to their having higher expectations of you. Then you will seek to fulfill those expectations, resulting in your performance growing even more.

Consider this example. You are starting a new job in a different department of your company and have little experience in that aspect of the business. On top of that, the new job is a very visible position and includes significantly more responsibility. Yet deep down you know you will succeed. This will not be the first time you have taken a risk in moving into a role with which you had only limited familiarity. You know you have created a successful track record that you can build upon and remember, leading you to believe you again will do well.

Figure 7-1: Perpetual Circle of Success

In addition, you were approached by your new manager about the position based on a conversation she had with your prior boss. You underwent a rigorous interview process and did well throughout. This all leads to your creating a positive expectancy among those with whom you will be working. The hiring managers and your new colleagues also expect you to do well because of referrals and their own positive interaction with you. Your beliefs coupled with the positive expectancies of others provide a powerful way to start off on the right foot in any situation. Remember, success precipitates success.

When you have built a high level of self-efficacy you will find that there is a connection between your actions and the outcome you want to achieve. Luck is nice to have at times—and even important—but it is neither a strategy nor sustainable. Research on reinforcement has shown that it is essential to be able to find how your behavior influences the outcome. When only luck is involved people quickly give up hope and stop trying. This leads to the feelings of learned helplessness that we covered in Lesson 6. It is important to note that self-efficacy is not a constant across everything you do. Instead it will vary with the task at hand. You can have a great deal of self-efficacy on one thing, but little on another. For instance, you may really believe that you are a great singer but would be absolutely terrified to try to swim. While you can build self-efficacy anywhere, your focus should be primarily on those areas that are most instrumental to your happiness and success.

It bears repeating that you own your trajectory. Others will help, but it is yours to obtain. Because of this simple fact you must view life and its challenges with an internal locus of control. People who have an internal locus or center of control believe they are in charge of their own success and take responsibility for it, as well as for their mistakes. When you do this you begin to create the expectancy that you do in fact determine your future. Recall Ron and Cindy, whom you met in Lesson 1. Cindy's actions provide an example of adopting an internal locus of control and steering the situation to one's advantage.

Ron, who had the opposite persona, adopted an external locus of control. He blamed others for his circumstances. Instead of looking for ways in which he could work through the new situation he looked for ways to blame others for his problems. Through doing this he gave up in believing in himself. Of course that was not productive, and he ultimately left the organization. When you adopt an external locus of control you divert important energy toward focusing on the wrong things. Instead of focusing on what you can improve and how you can achieve your goals, you spend valuable time searching for external factors and excuses for what went wrong. Moreover, when things go well you may attribute the events to luck instead of giving yourself well-deserved credit for your success. In a much broader sense it is important to realize that the one thing in life you can most control is yourself. You cannot always control your workplace, nor the actions of others. By focusing on your own performance and skill development you will best position yourself for continued growth. Be aware of what others are doing and learn from them, but do not get so caught up with what they are doing that you lose focus on the things you can control.

ENJOY YOUR SUCCESS

Sustaining outlier performance over time is extremely difficult without alignment of your interests and skills with your job. When you consider your desired trajectory you must do so with an awareness of your personality along with your strengths and weaknesses. If you do not account for your natural tendencies and preferences you will be less prepared for what will happen as you proceed through your career and trajectory. For example, if you are generally an introverted person, pursuing a career in sales may not be your best option. Similarly, if you are naturally extraverted you would do best to shy away from a job such as a night watchman.

Interestingly, personality types can even lead to different expected patterns in trajectories. Using the same example of introverted versus extraverted, let's review how trajectories might differ based on personality. Though nothing is 100 percent definitive, extraverts are likely to have more steep spikes, but also sharp drops in their trajectory. Introverts will instead tend to have a more sustained, gradual trajectory. When you look at Figure 7-2, you can see what this can look like. An introvert and extravert may have the same end goal, and both could achieve it. However, their paths could be substantially different along the way.

The reason is that they have different personality preferences, which drive their behavior. Whereas extraverts tend to speak more than listen, introverts are the opposite. Whereas introverts are more cautious and deliberate, extraverts are willing to move faster and take more risks. When you examine these two styles it becomes apparent why trajectories can differ. The introvert is less likely to make large mistakes but might miss out on big wins. Similarly, the extravert is more willing to accept and bounce back quickly from failure and might have large victories, but then make a miscalculation and go down before going back up. That would result in a less linear trajectory as compared to an introvert. If you have never done so, I encourage you to take a personality assessment to see where you fall on these and other personality continuums. Many employers have development programs that include one of these assessments, and many versions are also available online at no cost.

Figure 7-2: Sample Trajectories by Personality Type

By gaining a clearer understanding of your interests and strengths you will be able to focus on those areas and career trajectories in which personal fulfillment and success are most likely. A fundamental mistake that many people make is to spend an inordinate amount of time and energy on improving their weaknesses. While this is important, in some areas of weakness you will only be able to improve so much. Beyond that you are exerting effort in the pursuit of what is likely to lead to limited incremental improvement. Instead, by blending skills, interests, and aspirations, you will be in a position to build upon your strengths without having to change the essence of what is most important to you. This will lead you toward a career that will be more fulfilling and aligned with your personality preferences.

If you do not align your interests and natural skills in your occupation you will over time become burned out and demotivated. Instead of trying to force yourself to like something, change what you do or how you do it in a way that brings you joy. By changing in this way you are simply adapting, not compromising your innate interests or abilities. This is critical, as almost all sustained success requires change and adaptation. That does not mean, however, that you should try to change everything at once. When you try to do too much at once you can easily find yourself overwhelmed. Moreover, you will likely change a number of things, but only to a minimal degree of success. If you make one key change at a time, you will be able to focus more and your skill and comfort level will quickly expand. Soon, what was once an area outside of your comfort zone will become an area of competence. Like change, your trajectory is best managed through a series of successive and successful steps.

You will find that if you move along in such a manner you will find greater satisfaction and happiness. You must seek to maintain happiness throughout your career and life. Do not compromise it for short-term gain. Many people believe that success leads to happiness. This is proving to be fundamentally inaccurate. In an extensive meta-analysis, researchers found evidence that happiness is a stronger predictor of success than the other way around (meta-analysis is a statistical procedure in which results from many studies are brought together to find out what the “true” relationship is across variables). Our traditional sense of what matters is actually backward.

Shawn Achor expands on this idea in his book The Happiness Advantage, where he describes why it is so important to start with happiness. If you start with striving for success before striving for happiness, the goalpost keeps moving. You tell yourself that happiness is right around the corner, but then when you get there you want more. If you can just get that next raise, or big promotion, or whatever it is you think you need—then you will be happy. During the pursuit of success it is easy to sacrifice your happiness because you believe you will get back to it soon. What happens instead is that once you achieve that next success the novelty wears off, just as it does with a new car. After a few miles you already begin thinking about your next new car instead of being happy with the one you have.

Happiness does not result from pursuing success for its own sake. Happiness is better viewed as an outcome of what you will experience when you do something for which you have a great passion. You can sustain performance for a period of time without passion, but eventually it will catch up with you and you will find that your performance diminishes. If you are not happy at work, you are less likely to succeed to your full potential.

Ideally you will be able to find that job that perfectly blends your passions—inside and outside of work—so that you can find flow. Blake Mycoskie, who founded the shoe company TOMS, remarked that his business is the perfect job for him. And this is coming from someone who started five other companies first. The reason? Because at TOMS the job no longer felt like work. He found a way to blend his professional, personal, and philanthropic interests into one harmonious environment (TOMS is famous for donating one pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair purchased). Finding this perfect combination allowed him to concentrate all of his efforts on one mission, and in doing so he created a new intertwined business model combining profit with philanthropic giving.

When you are fully vested in and truly enjoy what you do, you substantially increase the likelihood of it leading to even greater things. Recall Tony Hawk, from Lesson 2. He did not get into skateboarding with the intent of building an empire around his iconic brand, he got into skateboarding because it is what he loves. Through the passion, skill, and persistence he displayed he went on to do things that nobody else had ever done before. Doing so then opened up even more opportunities that he was able to capitalize on.

FILTER THE NOISE

There is so much going on every day. Our worlds never seem to stop moving. You have priorities and commitments at work. At home. At church. At your child's school. Everywhere. Many of these activities are real priorities, but others are largely just distractions. When you turn on the radio any static you hear in the background is called noise, and the words or music you are trying to listen to is the signal. When you have too much noise you cannot hear the signal. That is, you cannot focus on what matters most. At work and in life you must separate the signal from all of the noise that surrounds you every day. When you do this you will get rid of “the stuff” that is distracting you and be able to focus on what matters.

We can use a traditional bell curve diagram (Figure 7-3) to demonstrate this point. Generally speaking, a lot of little things add up to a lot of time. The time often adds up because we ruminate over how much we have to do and procrastinate in getting things done. In Figure 7-3, Activity Importance and Time Spent are represented along the two axes. You can see that if you have ten hours, it is easy to spend more than half of your time on things that are less important. Look at the proportion of time you are spending on important things (signal) versus unimportant stuff (noise). A simple rule of thumb you can use is that if something will take less than five minutes, do it as soon as possible to get it out of the way. If you do this for an hour you can get twenty little things done quickly, which will drive out unnecessary distractions. By completing these activities you have just freed up your mind to focus on the big things with less distraction.

Figure 7-3: The Stuff Curve

I am not trying to imply that this is an absolute. Instead what I want you to take away from this is that prioritization is necessary. Little things are important and still need to get done. However, you should not spend more time on those than on the big things that matter and that have the largest impact on success in your life and career. Just as with decision making (Lesson 3), so many times you already know what to do. Do it and then invest your energy on the more important things—the things that will differentiate you in your career.

CONCLUSION

Sustained performance is never easy—but it is attainable. The secret is believing in yourself in order to make it happen. You can make it easier to reach sustained performance by striving to focus on that which gives you the greatest satisfaction. You can continue for a long time doing something successfully at work, but true success will only come when you match what you are doing with what you want to do. Without this match you will eventually feel like you are simply going through the motions, waiting for your real calling to come along. But it is not likely to come along on its own, and you should actively pursue that which you want.

With so much going on at any given time, it is often easy to ignore the little things and deem them inconsequential or irrelevant to your success. While there is an inherent desire for speed, the old saying “haste makes waste” frequently applies. Instead, it is often prudent to “slow down to go faster.” What I mean by this is that if you do things properly the first time you will stay on the right trajectory. If you do not, the speed you originally sought will elude you because you will find you need to backtrack. Through taking care in what you do and how you do it you will find that you can move faster than ever.

EXERCISE

NOTES