The year I failed to read 4 books a month but still learned about goals, intentionality and being a better human being

The year 2020 was a year full of personal, professional, and societal challenges that left many people facing struggles with health, finances, and relationships. Battling emotions that swung more unpredictably than a tilt a whirl. But challenges that drives us to the brink, can also become opportunities to do what we never thought possible. This happens when you switch your focus from what is being done to you, to what can you do with the challenge.  

Why Set a Reading Goal?

I was having success but I didn’t like the results. It wasn’t obvious to me that I was uncomfortable because life had become easy, but life had and I was heading towards misery.  Not sure what I mean, I was good at my job but found little satisfaction from the atta boys and the accolades because they felt more like noise than reassurance of a job well done. My family life was going well but I found reasons to be discontent about insignificant things because I needed something to fix.

I knew something wasn’t right but I couldn’t put a finger on it. Can you relate to having a lack of understanding for why your emotional state doesn’t match your results? I was there, and that was before COVID. So, I decided I needed to change the direction of where I was headed and the best way I knew how was to do some reflection with the help of experts.

For me that looked like marrying my love of learning with my love of competing. Specifically, to set a personal reading goal. What I found was that the average adult reads 4 books a year and the average “reader” will get through 12 (according to a 2016 article by Readers Digest). I decided to set a lofty goal because…

Leadership lesson- Leaders have goals. We have all heard that goals should be SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound) but I think we all need at least one goal where we replace the “A” with audacious instead of attainable. A shoot the moon over the top goal, that challenges us to go beyond what we think is possible. A goal that makes us uncomfortable and a bit afraid. Not afraid of the consequences of failing, but of the fear of being pushed to our brink.

Why I needed an audacious goal? Because I had gotten good at achieving my goals, most of which were easy.  My slate of easy goals resulted in me falling in love with attaining the goals. My love for achieving the goal lead me into a habit of setting easily attainable goals so I could experience the joy of achieving the goal.

What I had forgotten is that each goal starts with an important why. A thing that needed accomplished. Success wasn’t supposed to be about achieving the goal, but about what achieving the goal resulted in.

So whether you are leading yourself, a team or a business you need to set some goals that are SMART where the “A” means attainable, but also some goals where the “A” stands for “audacious”.  Giving yourself a challenge that will push you beyond what you thought possible, so you can find more of your potential. If I had a set an easy goal of 2 books/month I never would have picked up book 3 or 4 during a month. What would be the point, I already attained my goal.  

How Do you achieve an audacious goal?

What I can tell you is that despite the variety of authors and subjects (full list here) most of the books had an underlying theme. Books like Atomic Habits, Power of Habits, and The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry dealt with it directly, others could have named it but didn’t. However all of the books danced around one important guiding principle for success.

If you want to achieve your goals you need to be more intentional. Intentional with your time, talent, and treasure. People who achieve goals, especially audacious ones, are more intentional than the rest of us. They organize an ever-increasing amount of their most valuable resources around achieving the important things.

Leadership lesson-. Effective employees demonstrate intentionality in their own lives and work habits by knowing answers to questions like the below and then organizing their lives around the answers

·        What are my strengths

·        What are my most effective work habits (examples time of day, environment)

·        What activities give me energy and which ones take it away

·        What am I trying to achieve and why

Great leaders know how to recognize these things in others and how to intentionally organize teams around them for success. Great leaders

·        Set strategy so everyone is working towards the same goals (some are audacious)

·        Assign work to people that leverages their strengths then get out of the way so success can be achieved

·        Say yes to the right things and as Peter Drucker talks about in The Effective Executive they boldly say no to things that distract from the goals

·        Communicate regularly and candidly about why their teams are doing what they are doing (or not doing) and the benefits to others of the work

These things lead to a more intentional work environment where people can feel connected and organized around a purpose. People feel set up for success by being able to master their work and are allowed to do the work with autonomy. These three elements (purpose, mastery, autonomy) lead to engagement which I was reminded of by Daniel Pink in Drive.

If you set a goal and knew how to be intentional in hitting it, why did you fail?

Because it turns being right and being wrong feel a lot alike until the moment you realize you are wrong.

In May the world learned about the tragic death of George Floyd. On the heels of this tragedy, the world brought the topic of race back into the conscious of many. And while large quantities of people were going to social media to express their outrage, regardless of what they were outraged about, I sat quietly watching the world react. I took to silence partly because I am not properly educated on the issue but mostly because I did not want to deal with saying the wrong thing. Although silent, the silence wasn’t accompanied by inaction, it was accompanied by getting better educated about a subject I knew little about.  

I was turned on to the books Between the World and Me and White Fragility thanks to resources like the Carey Neuihoff Leadership Podcast where the issue was discussed candidly. Those books opened my eyes to some things that I had treated as truth but maybe I was wrong about. This event, the books and my reflections set me on a detour for about 6 weeks where I spent time contemplating and consuming more content (but not books) to seek truth. It was worth it, but I lost that time in the pursuit of my reading goal. At the end of these six weeks one thing was made clear in my mind.

What I learned is that privilege is real, I believe it because I realized that in part my silence was about not wanting to be perceived as upsetting an apple cart. One I didn’t know still existed nor that I was helping to push.

Even though I care deeply about my fellow humans and I have a heart for people who are struggling to raise their families. I had never thought before about how non-white folks comprise a disproportionate amount of the folks who are struggling. Statistically that doesn’t make sense there must be more to it than just generational bad luck or coincidence. This data point led me to take a hard look at how the people I encountered (and myself) interacted with the world, and turns out a lot of what I saw was pretty conclusive, privilege in many forms is at work all the time.

Leadership Lesson- Privilege is real, denying it does not make it go away, ignoring it doesn’t either, in fact those two things just put the cycle on repeat. You can either embrace your privilege and use it for the good of others or you use it to benefit yourself.

The explanation that hit home most clearly for me was about hiring practices. I am a big believer in the idea of Always Be Recruiting. I have a pipeline of candidates so when a job opens, I can quickly fill the role with a quality candidate. What I had not previously considered is that a super majority of the people in my pipeline have a lot in common. The people I have easiest access to share my demographics and not because I consciously exclude other people, certain people are just more accessible. So when I have an open role the people who I know (a form of privilege when I am the hiring manager) have an advantage over others, even if others are equally qualified. Because of ease the cycle repeats. The only way to break the cycle is to be intentional about breaking it. However, It is not possible to be intentional about breaking a cycle you don’t believe exists.

Great leadership at its heart is about helping others succeed in the pursuit of their goals which means as a leader you are called to use your privilege for the good of others.

This is true of any kind of privilege not just demographics. If you get special access because of your title, you should use that access to get exposure for those you lead. If you have wealth you should be looking for opportunities to use a portion of that wealth to provide opportunities/experiences to those who can’t on their own.

Regardless of the type of privilege you have use it for the good of others because that is what great leaders do.

Conclusion

Despite failing to achieve my goal, the audacious nature of the goal led me to read more than I ever thought possible (36 books in a year). More importantly the lessons learned through the wisdom of those 36 authors and their collective life experiences will impact me the rest of my life. Their knowledge has helped me grow exponentially as a professional, but more importantly it opened my eyes to blind spots that I can now work on to be successful on a much more important journey. The journey towards becoming a better human being. Which is what success in life and leadership is supposed to be about.

A full list of all 36 books including summaries and key themes can be found here.