Imagine a time in the past when you took on a hard challenge and knocked it out of the park. Now step through that entire experience in vivid detail. Remember how daunting that challenge first seemed? Walk through how you approached the problem. Recall the moment you realized you were going to be fine. Linger in particular on that feeling of success at the very end—the pride you felt, the compliments you received, the confidence you gained.

To help you get started, ask yourself the following:

• Assume you have a magic wand that makes everything your team does go perfectly. What do you hope will be different in two to three years compared to now?

• How would you want someone who works on an adjacent team to describe what your team does? What do you hope will be your team’s reputation in a few years? How far off is that from where things are today?

• What unique superpower(s) does your team have? When you’re at your best, how are you creating value? What would it look like for your team to be twice as good? Five times as good?

• If you had to create a quick litmus test that anyone could use to assess whether your team was doing a poor job, a mediocre job, or a kick-ass job, what would that litmus test be?

“How do you explain what it feels like to have been recategorized as a human being? That one day you were a normal person living your life, and the next day you were seen as abnormal?

TWELVE: How Were You Shaped by Your Sufferings?

“People who are permanently damaged by trauma seek to assimilate what happened into their existing models. People who grow try to accommodate what happened in order to create new models. The person who assimilates says, I survived brain cancer and I’m going to keep on chugging. The person who accommodates says, No, this changes who I

am...I’m a cancer survivor. This changes how I want to spend my days. The act of

remaking our models involves reconsidering the fundamentals: In what ways is the world

safe and unsafe? Do things sometimes happen to me that I don’t deserve? Who am I? What is my place in the world? What’s my story? Where do I really want to go? What kind of God allows this to happen?

• What things did I regret having sacrificed to date that I now wish to prioritize higher in my life going forward?

• When in my life (and not simply my career) have I found myself performing at peak levels, filled with genuine passion and purpose?

• In what environment do I seem to perform at my best?

• In what environments do I not perform at peak levels or enjoy the work?