Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More

Then forge unity: tell yourself to support a decision even if you disagree, and ask a colleague to do the same.

forceful champions (chapter six). They inspired people by evoking their emotions.

redesign your work so that you add more activities that create value, and stop or reject work that doesn’t.

Start by looking at your calendar the past two weeks: Circle each item that you think created very good value, and cross out those that yielded little or no value. Now do the same for the next two weeks.

Unfortunately, the convention is that you need to make a huge change in your life to achieve what Genevieve accomplished—you must quit your job and find a new career that gives you both passion and purpose at work. But as this chapter showed, that’s not true. You can make small changes to expand your passions at work. Join a new project that taps i

make a better effort to listen (put away that smartphone); articulate your own dissenting views; invite a colleague to argue an opposite position; prompt quiet colleagues to speak up; and pose a good question instead of telling others what you think.

Once you focus on activities that have an impact, improve them bit by bit by applying the learning loop,

tweak a way of doing your job, measure the outcome, get feedback on it, modify the approach,

persevering in the face of difficulty (grit) and deploying tailored tactics to circumvent opposition (smart).