Outwardly-Focused, Problem-Focused

Trait #7Outwardly-Focused, Problem-Focused

Bill Bradley, the former U.S. Senator and basketball star described his life purpose to me this way, “I want to be a medium, or I want to be a vehicle for improving the quality of people's lives. Whether it's their health, or whether it's their spiritual well being, or whether it's their economic circumstances. That's where I get the deepest fulfillment, when I'm doing something that actually can improve the quality of life of other human beings.”

Maslow reasons that a healthy self-worth also makes a person less self-focused, more problem-focused and ultimately willing to take more initiative and carry more responsibility for the greater good.  He writes in his book, "Motivation and Personality," that self-actualizing individuals “customarily have some mission in life, some task to fulfill, some problem outside themselves which enlists much of their energies… this is not necessarily a task that they would prefer or choose for themselves, it may be a task that they feel is their responsibility, duty, or obligation… In general these tasks are non-personal or unselfish, concerned rather with the good of humanity in general, or of a nation in general, or of a few individuals in the subject’s family.” 

Think of George Washington who really wanted to be on Mount Vernon, his farm rather than the White House.  Think of your favorite friends who become trustees of friends' and family estates – when there’s little or no reward and a lot of headaches. 

A key reason that these strong souls are outwardly-focused and able to take on responsibilities small and large is that they work at it in a very planned way. In other words, they prepare.  

“More important than the will to win is the will to prepare,” is a favorite quote of Charlie Munger’s, the Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. So much disappointment in life stems from our failure to turn dreams into goals and then goals into realities.  And that is due in large part to a lack of preparation.  Preparation requires study, organization, and provisioning.  I don’t know any successful person who is not a preparer.

Simply wanting and even exerting blunt effort for something is not enough. Carefully planned preparation that maximizes your efficiency and impact is what works. More important than the will to win is the will to prepare. And here’s the next and more subtle point about how the best among us prepare; top performers clearly distinguish between wants and goals or means and ends, but the best among us often take great pleasure in the means, the doing, not just the achieving.  As Maslow puts it, “Our subjects are somewhat more likely to appreciate for its own sake, and in an absolute way, the doing itself; they can often enjoy for its own sake the getting to some place as well as the arriving.”

My partner, Damian Smith is a top flight ballet dancer.  He says that working with the great French ballerina Muriel Maffre “is all about the process” rather than the performance.  For Damian, working with Maffre is a glorious lesson in preparation – the deconstruction of the steps, Maffre’s rigorous “honesty” of every gesture and the fierce discipline she brings to each rehearsal.  Maffre’s devotion to her art is so exactly prepared and intensely personal that the performance is secondary.  Indeed, the fact that it’s witnessed by thousands is tertiary. Just before the curtain rose on their first major pas de deux together in 1996, Damian will never forget that Maffre whispered to him, “We do zees for ourselves, not zem.  We have invited zem to watch.”

Love of your daily duties and preparation for great goals will not only make your life's dreams attainable, it can make much of the effort, a joy.  No wonder the best among us are more joyful.  Being joyful will be the subject of another installment of The Personality Traits of the Best Human Beings.

Cheers from Sonoma,

Donald