5. Focus the Fire
Letâs pause the Albright story to extract a lesson about the inner fire: A big source of fire lay in the fact that when in full hedgehog mode the people in our study quite simply loved what they were doing.
The key word here is âdoing.
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If youâre not sure what your ideal environment looks like, ask yourself the following:
- Which six-month period of my life did I feel the most energetic and productive? What gave me that energy?
- In the past month, what moments stand out as highlights? What conditions enabled those moments to happen, and are they re-creatable?
- In the past week, when was I in a state of deep focus? How did I get there?
During our research, we asked leaders which actions they rated are the most important for getting off to the right start. Topping the list were five items:
1. Absorb information.
2. Define the companyâs challenges.
3. Establish credibility and win employeesâ trust.
4. Access the senior management team.
5. Prepare yourself emotionally.
That said, there are three prevalent sources of fuel for the inner fire across the vastly different lives in the study. In addition to love of the doing, the two others are:
Extend Out/Circle Back: This is a continuous dynamic process of extending yourselfâ growing, learning, experimenting, expanding capabilities, discovering new encodingsâ while simultaneously drawing upon encodings discovered and capabilities developed earlier in life.
Of all the sources of fire, Iâve concluded that perhaps the biggest is sheer unadulterated love of the doing. Itâs like a personal flywheel within: If you discover something youâre encoded for and you love doing it, then you can't help but want to do more of it, which means you can't help but get better at it, which means you can't help but move toward the intrinsic satisfaction of excellence in what you do, which further reinforces doing what you are encoded for and love to do.
Extending out feeds the inner fire by animating the human yearning for growth, learning, discovery, and challenge; it activates the joy of self-development, capturing the youthful energy that comes from starting anew. Extending out can reveal previously hidden encodings; a continuous process of discovery that feeds the inner fire. (Wow, thatâs excitingâ I never knew I had that inside me!) Circle back also acts as a source of reinvigoration, but in a different way. Circling back reframes big bright encodings discovered long ago, which also feeds the inner fire. To circle back by tapping encodings discovered earlier in life is like refueling for the next phase if extending out.