18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done by Peter Bregman Read Free Book Online

something—whether it’s a job, a hobby, or an occasional recreational pastime—that exploits your strengths, allows for your weaknesses, uses your differences, and excites your passion. All you have to do is notice it.
    The speech I gave when I arrived at Princeton? The guidance I could offer the students who were worrying about their futures? Forget about your future. For just a moment, stop fixating on where you want to go. Instead, focus on where you are. Spend some time understanding
who
you are. And start from there.
    Start experimenting from who you are and choose your next move—your focus for the year—at the intersection of the four elements. That’s where your power lies.

9
Reinvent the Game
Element One: Leverage Your Strengths
    H ow can a few pirates in small boats capture and hold huge tanker ships hostage? How can a few scattered people in caves halfway across the world instill fear in the hearts of millions of citizens in the largest, most powerful countries in the world? How can a single independent contractor beat out a thirty-thousand-person consulting firm to win a multimillion-dollar contract?
    In
A Separate Peace
, John Knowles’s coming-of-age novel, Phineas invents the game Blitzball, in which everyone chases a single ball carrier, who must outrun every other competitor. As it happens, Phineas always wins because the rules of the game—a game he invented—favor his particular skills.
    That’s the secret of the successful underdog. Play the game you know you can win, even if it means inventing it yourself.
    Entrepreneurs intuitively understand this; they starttheir own companies for exactly this reason. I know a tremendous number of extremely successful people who could never get a job in a corporation because they never went to college. So they started their own companies: companies they designed to play to their unique strengths. They invented a game they could win, and then they played it.
    In his book
Moneyball
, Michael Lewis explains how the Oakland A’s, with $41 million in salaries, consistently beat teams with more than $100 million in salaries. The richer teams hired the top players based on the traditional criteria: the highest batting averages, most bases stolen, most hits that brought a runner home, and—get this—the all-American look.
    Other poorer teams who used the same criteria as the rich ones had to settle for second- or third-tier people who were less expensive. Which basically guaranteed that the richest teams had the best players and won.
    But the Oakland A’s studied the game and reinvented the rules. They realized that the number of times a player got on a base (on-base percentage) combined with the number of bases a player got each time he came to bat (slugging percentage) was a better predictor of success. And since no other teams were looking at those particular criteria, the players who excelled in those areas were relatively cheap to sign. Hiring those people was a game the Oakland A’s could win.
    Large consulting firms spend tens of thousands of dollars on glossy proposals to clients. But is that what winsthe game? Perhaps what really wins is client ownership over the project, and if you sit with the client and design the project with her, your one-page proposal (that she, in effect, co-wrote with you) will beat their hundred pages every time—at a fraction of the cost. That’s a game an independent contractor can win.
    Malcolm Gladwell, in his
New Yorker
article “How David Beats Goliath,” talks about the moment that David shed his armor. He knew he couldn’t win a game of strength against strength. But he also knew he was faster, more agile, and had better aim. So he picked up five stones, dashed out of the pack, and won the battle. He broke the rules and reinvented the game.
    Gladwell refers to research done by the political scientist Ivan Arreguin-Toft, who looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years in which one side was at least
ten