"But, tell me, why should your leader—why should you all—spend your money and risk your lives—for it is your lives you risk, Messieurs, when you set foot in France—and all for us French men and women, who are nothing to you?"
"Sport, Madame la Comtesse, sport,"
The Scarlet Pimpernel, by Baroness Orczy
The performance improvement world now possesses some myth-busting evidence and fascinating case studies about what it takes for anyone to do something really superbly well. I've been spending time researching this subject, and reviewing its application, and will cover it in a series of forthcoming posts. As a pre-view, a simplified how-to-be-excellent list from this research is as follows:
- Challenging standards, which are constantly reviewed to be achievable but not too easy or difficult
- Focus only on relevant actions and outcomes that are within your control
- Constant feedback and measurement of performance and progress
- Honest diagnosis of what is and isn't working: what works best, and what to change
- Removal of everything else that distracts, and support systems that allow you to do this
- Relentless continual mindful practice or application, intensively, for hours and hours and hours
As you can imagine, in order to pursue this relentless, repetitive process, you really do need to love what you're doing. This apparently ethereal issue is what I want to cover here – let’s talk about love.
Here’s what I don’t mean by love of what you’re doing. I don’t mean the pursuit of a lofty goal. I don't deny there's a part of each of us that feels the need to do something worthwhile; and I’ve no doubt that rousing ideals provide genuine motivation. But, by themselves, they don’t make us good at whatever we’re doing. We’ve all heard the jaded inspirational anecdote about a sweeper at NASA saying he’s putting someone on the moon. Was he a satisfied sweeper? Was he actually any good at sweeping? The anecdote runs out of steam on those points. Anyway, for many of us it's pretty hard to find the ultimate external benefit in much of the work we all do, to understand how everything comes together in the multifaceted interactions of society.
When I talk about loving what you’re doing, I mean the love of doing the thing for its own sake; the total absorption in process that you see in a great cook, scientist, bike mechanic, musician, orator, or athlete. Racking my brains, it’s hard to think of any examples of human excellence that don’t display this absorption. Neither does it seem to be confined to celebrated, world class performers; in my world, that same absorption is a hallmark of the top performing individuals and teams with which I have the pleasure to work.
So how do you or I access this love of doing something for its own sake, which underpins all this excellence? There's a received wisdom that stage one in becoming excellent and satisfied is to "follow your passion"; simple as that. Taken in isolation from the reality of what your friends, customers, team mates, and family all value, I think this advice is downright dangerous and destined to end in tears most of the time; but that’s a subject for another day. My point for today is that the world is not so linear: passion doesn’t just lead excellence, it also follows.
Even casual everyday evidence seems to show that our enjoyment and passion in doing something emerges and grows from excellence and application – the better we get at it, as long as we’re improving, the more we enjoy it. Did Tiger love golf the first time he swung and missed with the giant plastic golf club his dad bought him before he could walk? Did Becks immediately love curling in free kicks at the local park; or was that swerving, match-saver against Greece a bit more satisfying than the early ones? Did Tolstoy get passionate about prose in his first one-pager about his family cat; or did his passion become a little stronger with the development of an art that produced Anna Karenina? At a lower level, watch any celebrities-have-a-go-at-new-skill type show, and see how much they’re enjoying themselves in their first class or test, compared to the end of the series when they’ve developed a degree of mastery.
So my view is more emergent than the "start with your passion, something that stirs your loins, and watch good things follow" view of excellence. Fair enough, it’s smart to start with something that we enjoy, which works for both us and the others we care about commercially and socially. The key step for me is the next one: do all the things that it takes to do the thing really superbly well, and immerse ourselves in the process. With that, we’ll see the passion grow with our growing excellence, and we’ll enjoy the sport.
Some relevant links:
A simple experiment showing that performance increases with relevant challenge, and that enjoyment increases with performance, even in the most apparently meaningless task.
Alain de Botton talks with Russ Roberts about people’s absorption in the process of their jobs.
The Scarlet Pimpernel
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Latitude Partners Ltd
19 Bulstrode Street, London W1U 2JN
www.latitude.co.uk
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