18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done

A good story—one you feel deeply about and in which you see yourself—is tremendously motivating. Make sure the story you tell about yourself (sometimes only to yourself) inspires you to move in the direction you want to move.

if you’re a manager, your first duty is to do no harm. A friend of mine, Kendall Wright, once told me that a manager’s job is to remove the obstacles that prevent people from making their maximum contribution. That’s as good a definition as I’ve ever heard.

My uncle offered an alternative chain. Focus on the outcome, then choose your reaction. event → outcome → reaction

Here’s the thing: If you look like other people, and if your business looks like other businesses, then all you’ve done is increase your pool of competition.

ingredients that encourages opportunity, persistence, and luck. I call them the four elements. The four behaviors around which you should shape your next year: Leverage your strengths. Embrace your weaknesses. Assert your differences. Pursue your passions.

We need a way to quickly and confidently identify and reduce our extraneous commitments, to know for sure whether we should deal with something or avoid it, and to manage our own desire to be available always. I propose a little test that every commitment should pass before you agree to it. When someone comes to you with a request, ask yourself thr

Unfortunately, it’s a bad strategy. Because setting a rule and then letting people break it doesn’t make them like you—it just makes them ignore you. If Sean wants his secretary to listen to him, he needs to be consistent; no exceptions. On the other hand, he also needs to understand why she’s constantly disturbing him.

One by one, we dealt with all the issues people saw as obstacles. One by one, they made their own changes. One by one, they took ownership for the system and became accountable for using it. Is this only a large-scale change idea? Not at all. It’s useful whenever you need someone else to take ownership for something. Just get it half right. Hiring

Focus your year on the five areas that will make the most difference in your life.