SUPER STAYING POWER

What You Need to Become Valuable and Resilient at Work!By Jason Seiden

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright © 2010 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-07-163716-9

Contents

Chapter One

Magic Moments

IN THIS SECTION

* What are Magic Moments, and why are they important?

* What are the three main elements of a Magic Moment?

My Perfect Day

The call came in at eight P.M. It was Todd, my ski instructor, inviting me to ski with him and his friends the following day. This was a pretty special call. To understand why, it is helpful to have some background about Todd.

Todd has been a ski instructor his entire adult life. He currently instructs instructors, and it is no wonder why: as a teacher, he has that uncanny ability to simultaneously knock you off your pedestal and build you up at the same time. He shows you how to be great, but he also scrubs you clean of every last whiff of arrogance. Todd has been my instructor for about fourteen years. His wife, also an instructor, has been my wife's ski teacher for nearly thirty years. Our families are friends. But the importance of this phone call goes beyond my respect for Todd as an instructor or our personal relationship. It has to do with who Todd is as a person.

One memorable evening years ago, Todd invited me to have dinner at his house, which at the time was brand-new. The first thing I noticed when I walked in was a beautiful staircase, made of rough-hewn, half moon–shaped logs (flat side on top, for stepping). I commented on it. Todd's immediate response was to laugh, "I thought chopping that tree down was tough! Let me tell you the story about how I got it into the house!"

My chin hit the floor—but wait, it gets better. Todd did more than design and build the staircase. He also dug the foundation, a good portion of it with a shovel. Apparently, someone was late delivering the backhoe, and Todd didn't feel like waiting idly by for his house to come together when he could be putting it together himself. (Talk about a get-it-done attitude: commitment to the project, personal responsibility for the environment, focus, persistence, openness, initiative ... it was all there. Todd's experience building his house was, for him, as special as my perfect ski day, with one difference: my Magic Moment ski day is a memory, whereas his Magic Moment is now the home he sleeps in every night.)

On my tour of his new castle, I noticed a small skull, a hunting trophy, at the top of the staircase. A mountain cat skull. With a hole in the forehead. And next to the skull? The arrow that made the hole.

Now I don't know about you, but I don't think I'd ever like to be in a position to have to make that shot. I reckon if I'm putting an arrow through the forehead of a mountain lion, two things are true: one, I'm not the only one hunting that day, and two, that cat is in pouncing range when I shoot it. When I asked Todd about that, he was nonplussed. He even changed the subject. "Oh, that? Yeah, it was pretty serious. But I wasn't half as scared as I was when I had a moose chasing me in circles around a tree for three hours ... or—did I ever tell you about when we had a bear up in the tree out front?"

(For years after this evening, I felt, on a certain level, like my man card was not the same card he carried. I started filleting my own fish at restaurants. It wasn't much, but I had to do something, you know?)

Todd's larger-than-life persona applied to his skiing as well. Whenever I took a lesson with a different instructor, if I told him who my regular instructor was, the typical response I got was similar to what I imagine would happen if a guitar student at the local music shop mentioned that he often jammed with his neighbor, Eddie Van Halen. Even back in the day, I learned that many of the instructors took lessons with Todd. Most of them seemed just as impressed by him as I was. Others were petrified of the man.

So this invitation to come skiing with Todd and his friends, as a peer rather than a student, signaled that I had arrived. The invitation meant a lot to me. Todd, who built his house with his bare hands and taught instructors how to ski and could basically do anything better than anyone, was saying, "Hey, Jase, c'mon, you're one of us." It was important validation, which I'd guess anyone who has worked to master a skill—big or small—will understand.

Indeed, I distinctly remember being on the phone when he asked me to join the group. Quite suddenly, the clouds parted, the sun shone down directly on me, and cherubs began playing lovely music on their harps. It was euphoric. It was also a bit strange, as it was eight o'clock at night and dark and I was inside my apartment, but it was a spectacular scene nonetheless.

I awoke the next day to perfect conditions: eight inches of fresh snow, blue skies, forty-degree weather. A T-shirt day! It was truly as if the heavens had smiled upon me. I got myself ready and made my way to the base, where I met my new friends. I was one of two people, out of nine, not wearing ski patrol or ski instructor jackets ... and the other one was decked head to toe in Solomon gear. He was a manufacturer's rep. I was clearly out of my league.

With this group, normal mountain rules did not apply. In bounds, out of bounds, no bounds. We skied at the resort, we skied the back-country, we skied ... whatever the other guys felt like skiing. Our unofficial motto seemed to be "Have slope, will ski. Fast."

If you've never spent time in the mountains, it can be difficult to imagine how much a part of the world you feel when you're out there and things are going well. Skiing virgin powder that hadn't been touched all season—thigh-high stuff that throws spray up over your shoulders once you break through its thin, crispy coating—you are blind to everything and out of earshot of the world. You are this tiny thing hurtling down a slope, yet very much connected and squarely at the center of your own universe.

It was some pretty serious skiing, with pretty serious consequences for anyone who made a mistake. No one needed to tell us about the dangers of hitting a tree; every one of us skiing that day had lost a friend to a tree-related skiing accident. In the backcountry, a simple fall could prove disastrous. If a ski popped off out here, it could disappear forever, and we were a long hike from home. However, thinking about such things is a sure way to manifest them, so I tucked these concerns into the recesses of my mind and ignored them as we cut fresh tracks, ducked between pines, flew through bumps, and raced down the corduroy faster than city dwellers drive most of the time. I fell, often, but when I needed to be perfect, I was perfect.

Sometimes I could keep up with the rest of the group. Other times, like when I was navigating pine trees and trying to avoid the quicksand-like powder beneath the branches, I couldn't. I alternated between getting down the mountain in record time and thinking about ... getting ... around ... this next ... rock ... aaaand ... holy ... crap-not-much-space-between-those-trees-turn-NOW-moving- fast-whoa-where'd-this-dip-come-from-I'm-gonna-get-catapulted-here-we-go- wheeeeee!-I'm-flying!-now-where-the-#$%!-am-I-supposed-to-land?!

Silence.

Breathe.

Look around, find friends.

Smile. Bend a bit because legs are shaking from the exertion.

Relax for a moment until someone asks, "Hey, who wants to do that one again?!"

In the late afternoon sun, as I sat outside with my beer and thought about what had happened out there that day, I thanked the mountain for testing me without breaking me. I had a flash of all the runs I had done that day—every turn, every wipeout, every kicker—and I thought to myself, "This is perfect. It truly doesn't get any better than this."

Your Perfect Day

Inevitably, when I tell this story to a group, people's minds wander away from my ski day to events from their own lives when they experienced that same feeling—that same sense of perfection. Maybe it was during a special event, or perhaps it was on some unremarkable Thursday when you managed to hit all green lights and everything just went your way for a change. Whatever it was, you've had one. At least one. Your perfect day. Can you recall it? Do you remember that feeling?

That was your Magic Moment, your moment of deep, personal contentment, brought about by the perfection of the moment. That was your taste of success.

The Explanation

Ever have someone explain the punch line of a joke you told? I have. It stinks. It's even worse when it's not a joke but the mechanics of your all-time favorite experience being explained to you.

Shortly after my magical ski day, I went back to work, which at the time meant going back to an office where I was the lone M.B.A. swimming in a sea of Ph.Ds. Naturally I was asked about the trip, and so I shared my experience, in colorful and somewhat poetic terms.

Not that I have anything against Ph.D.s—quite the contrary, I married one—but on this particular day, the particular doctor of philosophy with whom I was speaking was particularly academicish. She looked at me and nodded as I spoke. She continued to nod long after I had finished my story. (Don't be fooled: nodding is a meaningless, practiced behavior meant to keep others talking. Shrinks are masters of it. They call it "acknowledging" behavior. I call it a great way to feign interest in others when you don't care to engage.) Eventually, when she realized I wasn't going to give her any more material, she stood up and announced, "Well, sounds like you had a great time!"

I parried, glad to have moved from soliloquy to conversation: "I sure did! Have you ever been—"

She cut me off. "Let me explain why you had so much fun."

What?! Explain? That's not how a conversation is supposed to work!

It was too late. She was on a mission. Before I knew it, she stood at the white board in my office, marker in hand. She proceeded to explain how my experience could be described as a moment of deep, personal contentment. How the wiring in my brain colluded with various environmental factors to produce the special feeling of that day. How the structure of the day's events had enabled me to sustain that feeling. She mentioned how her model was supported by recent research by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. That was about all the explaining I could take. I threw her out of my office before she could get much more else out, but by then, it was too late. My Magic Moment, like the punch line of a favorite joke, was in shambles. I had had enough.

The Discovery

I stewed, off and on, for a long while. Eventually, though, I decided I was done being angry. The memory was too important, too much a part of me, to allow it to be tarnished by a single conversation. I needed to find a way to get the romance back.

Much to my surprise, it was easy.

When I actually stopped and thought about it, I could find no bullet holes: the memory was still complete, still perfect. Despite having been broken down and parsed, I could still relive it and recapture the feelings from that day. The romance of the moment was still alive and well.

I stood there, thinking about my skiing experience, and as I did so, I was transported right back to the first phone call. Right there, on a sidewalk in downtown Chicago, the clouds parted once again, trumpets played, and cherubs came down from the sky to play their harps just for me.

You should have seen the faces on the people around me.

The memory was as intensely satisfying as the original event had been. And that's when I discovered the real magic: these moments permeate your soul and become a part of you. They fill every fiber of your being and can't be undone by the ramblings of some pompous windbag.

True success is much more than a moment in time. It is a moment in the more transcendental sense of the word. Success stops time. It expands you into something more. It obliterates fear and connects you to something bigger than yourself. Success is not necessarily happiness, but to hear people describe it, you can tell where happiness fits into the equation.

Success—via Magic Moments—happens when you rise above the human condition and become something more.

I felt like I had just discovered a perfect joke that could be explained and would be just as funny afterward as it had been before.

After the discovery, what went through my head next was a flurry of activity that went something like this:

* I just wasted time being angry. Oops.

* I hope I haven't said anything that I'll regret. I may owe someone an apology. Do I owe someone an apology?

* If I know the elements of how to create this deep contentment, and understanding them doesn't preclude me from enjoying them in the moment, then I can do more than explain them—I can create them!

* If I could get this feeling of contentment in my personal life, why couldn't I experience it at work, too? No rule says I can't ... right?

* Even if there were a rule, that's precisely the kind of rule I'd enjoy breaking.

* Success in life just got easy. I can overlay this idea atop any area of my life!

* I'm going to have to take full ownership of my problems. That may be tough, as I don't have sufficient authority to control my world directly. I'm going to have to figure something out.

That last point in particular scared me a bit: there were definitely things standing between me and deep, personal contentment, and those things definitely seemed external in nature. Alright, I need to be honest. There were people standing between me and deep personal contentment: people holding me back, clipping my wings, stealing my thunder, telling me no, controlling my client interaction, dictating my billing. But, according to this model, none of what they did mattered. The model looked wrong but felt right. Really right—cherubs and harps kind of right. I took a deep breath.

I was on another tee box, being told the slope of the course, and again my eyes were telling me something else. If I was going to use the model, I was going to have to trust what I knew instead of what I saw. I was going to have to trust that I could own my own destiny, even though it appeared that I didn't seem to have sufficient power to do so.

My brain raced, trying to remember what my colleague had said the components of a Magic Moment were. Oh, no, I had kicked her out of my office too soon! I needed her back.

She had some 'splainin' to do.

I went back to the office, found my new favorite Ph.D. (other than my wife), and asked for a more detailed explanation of what had happened to me on the slopes. This time, I was the one using a writing utensil. I didn't want to miss a thing.

What follows is what I learned that day.

The Magic Moment

A Magic Moment is a moment of deep, personal contentment that is the result of an intensely satisfying experience. Magic Moments are those moments when you completely lose yourself, when consciousness moves at unconscious speeds, and that stay with you forever. You close your eyes and you're back there: the sights, the smells, the sounds; everything is preserved.

Magic Moments are caused by an understandable, predictable, manageable set of conditions. You can learn to create the conditions necessary to foster Magic Moments, and when you do, you can string multiple Moments together, or include other people, allowing you to create Magic Moments on a large scale. No, your life probably won't become one long, extended Magic Moment. (It could, though, if all the elements of your personal equation came together just right—and how cool would that be? You could change your name to Buddha.) Ups and downs are to be expected. The key is to focus on turning the ups into Magic Moments. And because they are actionable, adaptive, and universal, Magic Moments can be used to provide the foundation for career success in any job, in any field, in any industry.

Creating Contentment

You probably already are pretty good at creating Magic Moments in your personal life. Likely, you create them frequently. This entire book would probably be superfluous if the subject weren't work but how to hang out with friends or how to enjoy a hobby. Not that we're always successful in areas outside of work, but the idea of living in the moment to make the relationship / activity / event a Magic Moment seems to come more naturally to people when discussing non-work activities.

Still, there's no rule that states that we can't have Magic Moments at work. So if you are going to be at work for thirty, forty, fifty hours a week, why not try? We often put barriers between ourselves and work-related Magic Moments. Why? Opening ourselves up to Magic Moments at work can help us establish the framework for our career success story, and Heaven knows we could use some more success stories. Let's open ourselves up and go create some.

Opening Yourself Up to a Magic Moment

So how do you open yourself up to a Magic Moment? You need a whopping total of three things: you need a goal you can commit to, an environment you can shape, and a winner's attitude that is focused, persistent, and open.

That's it; when these three elements are in place, voilà, Magic Moment.

Ready to dive in?

Awesome. Let's do this.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from SUPER STAYING POWERby Jason Seiden Copyright © 2010 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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