The One Thing You Need to Know About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success

Putting these conclusions together, this controlling insight can serve as the One Thing you need to know about happy marriage: Find the most generous explanation for each other’s behavior and believe it.

look at your life as a series of sprints, they say, rather than a marathon. Impose on your life a set of routines that allow you to stress yourself, then recover, stress, then recover, and you will find that, over time, your capacity, your resilience, and your energy will all expand.

For strengths: 1. What was the best day at work you’ve had in the last three months? What were you doing? Why did you enjoy it so much? For weaknesses: 2. What was your worst day at work in the last three months? What were you doing? Why did it grate on you so much? For triggers: 3. What was the best relationship with a manager you’ve ever had? What made it work so well? 4. What was the best praise or recognition you’ve ever received? What made it so good? And for unique style of learning: 5. When in your career do you think you were learning the most? Why did you learn so much? What’s the best way for you to learn?

This advice—be clear about whom you serve—appears straightforward, but it is surprising how many leaders allow their answer to be vague, imprecise, or, most damaging of all, complex.

They apply this to all forms of energy—mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical—and offer up some very practical routines you can immediately install into your working life. For example, they tell us that since the human body is designed to work most effectively in ninety-minute increments, you should discipline yourself to get up after an hour and a half’s work and walk around, breathe deeply, take a break. No matter how engaged you are in finishing a project or writing an e-mail, when the ninety-minute bell sounds, stop your work, walk around, breathe deeply, take a break. I’ve found this to be extremely valuable advice. In fact, I am trying to discipline myself to write this book as a series of sprints. I don’t know if it will make the book any better, but it sure seems to leave me with more energy at the end of the day.

Partnership is not the crutch of the imperfect, but the secret of the successful.

To keep track of your effectiveness at this, every three months you may want to take a moment to write down your answer to this question: what percentage of your day do you experience a feeling of self-efficacy, that optimistic, positive, challenged-yet-confident, authentic feeling? Phrased more simply, what percentage of your day do you spend doing those things you really like to do?