This one is about getting clear on what the real work is.
As far as I know, no one is exempt from the temptation to focus on the wrong things: anyone - whether a president or a beekeeper - can get drawn into the gravitational pull of the habitual, the immediate and the irrelevant. Usually you can tell when this happens because pretty soon you start to feel frustrated and miserable.
That’s the universe telling you that you’re not focusing on the right thing.
On the other hand there is a kind of work you do that creates the most amount of value. This work is likely to be a combination of doing work supported by thinking work, underpinned (invisibly) by being work. The real effort might not be at the point of delivery, but rather upstream in the creation of clarity, or around the design of a product or service, or a particular kind of research.
Whatever it is, you probably avoid it or don’t give it enough credit.
For example - I’ve been coaching someone recently who has the ability to visualise solutions to complex problems with uncanny and instant clarity: he can see all the steps, the range of necessary inputs and a perfectly defined end state - all laid out in front of him like a map. He can then execute on it and get it done by sheer graft and diligence, but the key piece - the important bit, his magic ingredient - is this power of his imagination. That work is effortless, a gift.
Naturally, he discounts this gift - as do you, probably.
It took time to draw my client’s attention to this - the uniqueness of it, how much value it sits upstream of, how easily he could re-narrate his value and focus on what he enjoys more than all that unnecessary, downstream toil.
I’ll come back to this theme of upstream and downstream - I’ve been thinking about it a lot. For the moment, consider whether you too could get clearer on your real work: That thing you do that’s invisible, feels so little like work, or seems so obvious to you that you take it for granted and assume everyone else can do it too.
Don’t be like the fish…
www.laurenceshorter.com
ps, if you like this you might enjoy my lightly hectoring manifesto Elevate the Artist