Of course, if we were able to watch a great athlete training, or a great writer writing, or a great coder coding, we would see that honing a strength is hard work—it is by no means easy to find that incremental margin of performance when you are already operating at a high level—and that a strength is not where we are most “finished” but in fact where we are most productively challenged. Yet we are told to resist the temptation to “just” play to our strengths, and instead to work constantly on our weaknesses. In common parlance, we are told to avoid “running around our backhand.” This betrays, perhaps, a misunderstanding of what a strength actually is. It is not, for each of us, where performance is easiest—it is where performance is most impactful and increasing.

Wouldn’t it be more valuable to your company, and more fun for you, if you considered your working world a celebrity arena rather than a bloody one? Almost automatically, such an approach accomplishes several things:

It stimulates the best of your analytic skills. Like a dancer or a quarterback, you fit your movements into an overall plan, with fluidity, precision, accuracy, and grace.

It deepens your intuition. Like an actor, a shortstop, or a golfer, you listen with interest and respect to your own inner voice as well as to your director or coach.

It eliminates destructive competition. The string section of an orchestra knows that the goal is not to kill off the percussion section. The goal is to establish synchronization and to make harmonic contributions to an intricate whole.

It develops skills serially and painlessly. Professional athletes, musicians, and actors consider each performance a rehearsal for the next one, knowing that perfection comes only with persistent practice. As Lama Sogyal Rinpoche said in our class, “Slowly, slowly - is fast.”

It develops concentration, efficiency,accuracy, and humor. Painters, writers, skiers, cooks - artists of every kind - discover early that good things move in when fear moves out.

Brain imaging studies show that when we picture ourselves doing something, the same parts of our brain are engaged as if we were actually doing that activity. Why does this matter? Because we can trick ourselves into getting some of the benefits of an activity simply by closing our eyes and imagining it in our heads.

The story’s power, then, is twofold: It provides simulation (knowledge about how to act) and inspiration (motivation to act). Note that both benefits, simulation and inspiration, are geared to generating action. In the last few chapters, we’ve seen that a credible idea makes people believe. An emotional idea makes people care. And in this chapter we’ll see that the right stories make people act.

Here’s the answer: The event-simulation group—the people who simulated how the events unfolded—did better on almost every dimension. Simulating past events is much more helpful than simulating future outcomes. In fact, the gap between the groups opened up immediately after the first session in the lab. By the first night, the event-simulation people were already experiencing a positive mood boost compared with the other two groups.

When the groups returned a week later, the event simulators’ advantage had grown wider. They were more likely to have taken specific action to solve their problems. They were more likely to have sought advice and support from others. They were more likely to report that they had learned something and grown.

You may find these results a bit counterintuitive, because the pop-psychology literature is full of gurus urging you to visualize success. It turns out that a positive mental attitude isn’t quite enough to get the job done. Maybe financial gurus shouldn’t be telling us to imagine that we’re filthy rich; instead, they should be telling us to replay the steps that led to our being poor.