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

times stronger
than the other. He found that the weaker side won almost 30 percent of the time—a remarkable feat. The reason? They fought a different war than their opponents.
    The 70 percent that lost? They fought the conventional way; they engaged in battle using the same rules as their stronger opponents.
    In 1981, Doug Lenat, a computer scientist, entered a war game tournament in which each contestant was given a fictional trillion-dollar budget to spend on a naval fleet of their choosing. The other contenders had deep military backgrounds and built a conventional naval fleet with boats of various sizes with strong defenses.
    But Lenat had no military background. He simply fed the rules of the tournament to a computer program he invented: a program that was built to win, not to follow convention.
    “The program came up with a strategy of spending the trillion dollars on an astronomical number of small ships like P.T. boats, with powerful weapons but absolutely no defense and no mobility,” Lenat said. “They just sat there. Basically if they were hit once, they would sink. And what happened is that the enemy would take its shots and every one of those shots would sink our ships. But it didn’t matter, because we had so many.”
    Lenat won the game in a landslide.
    What game are you playing? Is it the right game for your particular skills and talents? Is it a perfect setup for you or your company to win? If not, then perhaps it’s time to play a different game or invent one of your own: one you can win.
    The first element is your strengths. Over the coming year, play the game that is perfectly suited to your strengths.

10
I’ll Just Take the Shrimp
Element Two: Embrace Your Weaknesses
    I was having lunch with a friend of mine, Geoff, a man who has been very successful in business. Deeply generous, he gave away the majority of his fortune, hundreds of millions of dollars, to a foundation.
    When the waiter came to take our order, Geoff asked for the Caesar salad with shrimp and then added, “But instead of shrimp, could you put salmon on the salad?”
    “That’s no problem, sir,” the waiter responded. “Just so you know, though, it’ll be an extra dollar.”
    “You know,” Geoff replied after a moment’s hesitation, “forget it. I’ll just take the shrimp.”
    What do you call that? Cheap? Strange? Dysfunctional? I call it the secret to his success. Not yours, by the way. His.
    Geoff has a fixation on value. He can’t stand the idea of spending a single extra dollar if it doesn’t provide at least two dollars of value. Maybe that’s extreme. But so isa fortune (and foundation) of hundreds of millions of dollars. He’s not successful
despite
his quirk; he’s successful
because
of it.
    And what’s made Geoff successful is that he’s not embarrassed about it. Or ashamed. He doesn’t hide or repress or deny it.
    He uses it.
    I was talking to a famous guy I know—someone whose name you would instantly recognize—when he started name-dropping.
Hold on,
I thought,
you don’t have to name-drop to me. I’m already impressed. In fact, you’re the name I use when I’m name-dropping.
    Why was my famous friend name-dropping? Because after everything he’s achieved, he’s still insecure. Which is, at least in part, why he’s achieved so much. He never would have worked so hard, spent so much time and effort on his projects, continued to apply himself after he had “made it,” if he weren’t insecure. His dysfunction has turned out to be tremendously functional.
    “The most interesting novels,”
Newsweek
editor Malcolm Jones wrote in a recent book review, “are the ones where the flaws and virtues can’t be pulled apart.”
    That’s even truer for people. The most powerful ones don’t conquer their dysfunctions, quirks, and potentially embarrassing insecurities. They seamlessly integrate them to make an impact in the world.
    Another man I know was the driving force behind health reforms that