How to Take Your Performance to the Next Level

• Take time to muse. You need time alone to let your mind live with the things you’ve seen and what you’ve experienced, so it can settle into some sort of shape. This thinking time is vital to your well-being—without it, you feel confused and on edge. It is also vital to your performance—it is the ground from which will spring new insights and discoveries. Take it very seriously. You need it. Others don’t, and they won’t quite understand why you do. So build it into your schedule and stick to it religiously. It doesn’t have to be so frequent that it interferes with your daily work. It just has to be predictable—you are comforted knowing that thinking time is coming.

• As a Creator you will have to figure out how to “own” your creations. At one extreme, this might mean working only in fields where you are allowed to own the intellectual property you create, such as journalism or entertainment. Or you might work for a large organization only if they allow you to write papers under your name or file for patents under your name. If neither of these is a possibility for you, still you will need to figure out a way to “sign” your work.

• Create a forum for safe experimentation, a place where you can share new, as yet fragile, patterns of understanding. It could be a cross-industry group of like-minded thinkers. It could be an informal Skunk Works within your own organization. Wherever it is, it should be comprised of people who question you and challenge you with no agenda other than helping you to strengthen (or break) the sense you’ve made. This group will become your testing ground.

• Stick your neck out. What is your highest-leverage “creation,” the one with the greatest exposure and risk, yet the greatest potential upside? In other words, what is your home run?

• Seek out the “enemy camp.” Deliberately forge a relationship with people who see things very differently from you. They may discredit the sense you make. They may even disparage your work. And you may still disagree with them. But by exposing yourself to them, you will prevent yourself from becoming complacent.

• In this enemy camp, look for evidence that contradicts what you’ve come to believe. Faced with this, you will either become more articulate in explaining your point of view or you will discredit the contradictory evidence or you will expand your view to incorporate this evidence. Each of these is, in its own way, a positive outcome.