Stay in the Moment

In Star Wars Episode V, the fictional Jedi master Yoda has his three-fingered hands full instructing his pupil Luke Skywalker to be in the moment. The location: a remote swamp. Young Luke is teetering in a handstand—and little wonder. His challenge is to simultaneously stack rocks one atop the other by means of the mysterious telekinetic ability known as the Force. “Concentraaaate!” Yoda exhorts. Luke collapses instead. “All his life has he looked away,” Yoda later muses, “to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was, what he was doing.”

It takes practice not to look away, no matter who you are. For Michelle McKenna, not every task associated with the virtual draft was interesting or invigorating, nor was emotional support readily available. She was both an empty nester and a young widow. She spent the early pandemic mostly alone. Days: monumental project management. Nights: details. Media kits had to be assembled and sent to nearly two hundred draft prospects, coaches (college and NFL), team owners, and general managers.⁵ McKenna’s evenings were filled with boxes, labels, and FedEx drops. She was facing a voracious deadline. Eventually her son arrived and took over assembly; friends left meals on her porch. Media kits (and meals) could have become major distractions. Loneliness could have, too. But McKenna stayed in the moment. She adapted, she delegated, she stayed on task.

Some tasks were invigorating. Orchestrating the virtual draft meant McKenna was the de facto TV director. The show was live on the air. She found herself doing something she’d never have dreamed of. Push camera one, ready camera two, make on-the-spot calls about who and what appeared on screen. To her own surprise, she loved it. With her mind on where she was, McKenna found herself on yet another micro curve.

Where is your mind? Stacking rocks of self-doubt? Sidetracked by the peripheral? Decidedly not! You are a Metamorph, and Metamorphs do not derail their productive flow. You can and will focus on the now. You will concentrate. You will grow wings.

Meditation can help us stay in the moment. But as Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist and longtime mindfulness researcher, says, “Meditation is something you engage in to lead to mindfulness. Mindfulness is an ongoing act in the moment, a way of being.”⁶ This is an important distinction. Meditation is an exercise; mindfulness is a way of being present. The majority of us spend most of our time not being present. Langer says, “When you’re mindless, you’re not able to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves.… You’re not there and you’re oblivious to not being there.”

He’s fictional, yes, but Yoda’s assessment often applies to us. We’re holding back our own metamorphosis when we aren’t present where we are, living our own lives inside our own bodies, inside the moments we’re given.

Langer teaches that a good place to start is simply paying more attention to what, and who, is right before us. We are mindfully engaged, Langer says, “by simply noticing new things.” If you start looking for the unfamiliar in the familiar—if you make a point of noticing what you don’t know, hidden amid the things you do—you’ll stay in the moment. The moment will teach you. You will be able to get smarter about your growth.

In my office hang eight botanical drawings, primarily strawberries. As I shared with you in Collector (chapter 2), my husband grew up on a pick-your-own-berry farm in Maryland. In our current home, we also grow strawberries. For me, strawberries are home. But they have an additional symbolic meaning. Strawberries are whole, not sectioned or compartmentalized like an orange. The images of strawberries remind me not to let my attention become too compartmentalized, to keep my focus whole and on what is most important to me.

Triumph over Triggers

Some words, images, or ideas can trigger emotional distress. Emotional triggers are often rooted in past trauma, indelibly etched in memory, bringing fresh pain when forced into recall. Bad childhood memories are particularly stubborn. Emotional triggers can erode our confidence and leave us vulnerable to discouragement and depression. “I can’t stop thinking about it,” we might say. We may lose functionality at work or at home, as racing thoughts monopolize our energy. We can’t go to sleep or stay asleep. We can’t wake up. Triggers can upend our progress in the sweet spot and undermine our capacity to become a Metamorph. They are particularly devastating when they interrupt metamorphosis just as the chrysalis is beginning to crack.

Smart growth requires us to overcome patterns caused by triggers, such as seeking solace in addictive behavior or substances. Oftentimes triggers are linked back to shadow values, the values we talked about in the Explorer chapter, that are revealed by our default behavior. We espouse being a team player, but, in reality, we play to win at all costs. In this example, we could be triggered if we don’t get a shout-out at the end of a big project we’ve worked hard on, even if it’s an unintentional oversight. Absent the shadow value of needing to be recognized as a winner, we’d likely shrug our shoulders and say, “Whoops, forgot my name.” If we do hold that shadow value, we could spend hours, days, even weeks harboring resentment, perseverating over what it means for our status, formulating a plan to redress this grievance, and so on.

I don’t believe that any adult is trigger-free. Too many of us may have experienced some form of abuse and neglect, whether we realize it or not. Unresolved issues will bubble up from time to time, maybe frequently. When we have been triggered, it’s important to acknowledge our feelings of loss and pain. There is no shame in expressing childlike grief, just as there is no shame in making childlike errors. This is a critical step in the healing process, often a step left undone when the formative trauma occurred. The pain of being unable to express what we felt at the time of the initial trauma may be proportional to a trigger’s power to sabotage us in the present.

To deal with these emotional grenades, I ask myself questions like: How would my future self (meaning the person that I aspire to be) react? Who do I want to be right now? How would someone who I admire hope I would respond in this situation? If you are a person of faith, ask, What course of action would my faith suggest? Reframing and seeing the situation from a different perspective helps me right-size my response.

Here are two additional go-to techniques for deactivating triggers. First, I think about three things that I am grateful for right now, like the keyboard I am typing on, the hummingbird alighting on the feeder outside my window, and our cat Penelope lounging regally next to my computer. Expressing gratitude activates the parasympathetic nervous system and signals safety. The second practice, which I learned from psychologist Emma McAdam, is similar: immediately focus on three things I see, three things I hear, and three things I can touch.⁷ The SWAT team of my physical senses helps subdue my reptilian, reactive brain. These mindful behaviors help me (and may help you too) stay in the moment, not in the memory.

Finally, the truth tellers in our orbits (including mental health professionals) can help us talk through triggering events and plan how to deal with them. It may take time, but we can triumph over what triggers us.

Just as the strength a butterfly musters in breaking out of the chrysalis is part of its metamorphosis, our learning to identify and defuse triggers will help us take flight.

Healthy Body, Sharp Mind

The whetstone that sharpens our mind is our body: what we eat, how we sleep, how we exercise.

Food, for example, manufactures the building blocks of our brain. Everything in our bodies is constructed of food, right down to our neurons. As health guru Shawn Stevenson said to me, “Food is your secret weapon.” Intuitively and logically, we know it’s true. But do we eat like we know it’s true? Food can make us strong; all too often it makes us weak. Research conducted on prison inmates suggests that having a bad diet is a better predictor of future violence than past violent behavior. Stevenson puts it bluntly: “You can predict bad behavior by what a person eats.”⁸ In sports, a diet of good, healthy food can be the difference between a gold medal and a participation trophy. Eat like a winner.

But here’s where my twenty-year-old daughter would say we are going to do some real talk. As she frequently observes, and occasionally says out loud, when I am under stress (like on a deadline for a book), more than half the calories I consume come from something sweet. My nickname—Cookie Monster—is hard earned. When it comes to healthful eating, I frequently don’t earn even a participation trophy.

The agony of adulthood is that we want to make these changes but feel we can’t make them all at once; we are buried in work and stress; we struggle for ways to cope, to get by. If we can’t make them all at once (and who can, really?), we may be paralyzed into no action at all. So if you’re like me and most people, you know you ought to eat better; you want to eat better; time and busyness get in the way. If transforming your diet feels like more than you can take on right now, are there baby steps that would help you launch a manageable S Curve of gradual dietary improvement? Any positive change, however small, can be powerful (as we discussed in the Explorer chapter, little actions compound over time, resulting in big change) and can create space in your habits for additional improvements. Can you add one fresh fruit or vegetable to your day? Start somewhere.

You can also sleep your way to smart. “Focusing attention on learning something, followed by sleep, is a magic combination allowing for new synaptic connections,” says researcher Barbara Oakley, author of the hit book and online course Learning How to Learn, and a collaborator with Terry Sejnowski (who you met in Accelerator, chapter 3).⁹ Neurons activated while we are awake are reactivated during subsequent sleep. That’s why you review your action board before going to bed. You are priming your brain to grow while you are sleeping.

Don’t forget exercise, essential to metamorphosis. An experiment conducted by Sejnowski and his Salk Institute colleagues compared groups of mice that were active with groups that were kept inactive.¹⁰ In both the active and the inactive groups, the rate at which new neurons were born was the same. But the mice that were active learned faster and retained more. Their synaptic networks increased at a faster rate, and the synapses were stronger. “Long-term potentiation,” Sejnowski told me, “is enhanced by exercise.”¹¹

Say No to Yes

“Yes” lifted us off the launch point. The more we said yes, the more opportunities became available to us. But saying yes too often siphons momentum. We need to learn to say no to yes. During the final week of writing before this book’s manuscript was due, for example, I didn’t hem and haw and feel angst like I often do when I am asked for something. Pretty much, no matter what the ask, the answer was no. Being clear on the pressing priority, the pain that I often feel when I say no was alleviated. Saying no without nagging regret is essential for all of us if we are going to focus and transform.

Ryan Westwood understands this. His first foray into business was at age eleven.¹² Inspired by an English class assignment on “Why I want to be an entrepreneur,” Westwood put price tags on all his beloved baseball and basketball cards, got the owner of a local shop to let him set up a kiosk in his store, and sold his sports cards, earning about $10. It felt like “magic,” he says. By age forty, he’d built and sold two companies. When I interviewed Westwood for our podcast, he told me he had, over the course of his career, reached out to thousands of entrepreneurs to learn what made them successful. His conversation with Eric Morgan, then CEO of Workfront, stood out. Morgan told Westwood, “Once we found our differentiator, we focused, and we said, ‘No.’ ”¹³

Westwood followed Morgan’s advice. In his second business, Simplus, he transformed it from a “broad Salesforce implementer,” to one in which “we only implement one Salesforce technology. We said no to everything else. It took incredible discipline and is counterintuitive to an entrepreneur. But by focusing and differentiating, we landed contracts with the biggest companies in the world.”

As a from-the-cradle entrepreneur, Westwood tends to see S Curve opportunities everywhere. But being a smart growth leader, he knew that to grow Simplus, he would need to transform himself first. From a career standpoint, he said, “I started pursuing [only things] related to Simplus. Anything related to my book, anything related to a podcast, anything related to anything that did not promote Simplus, I said no to it.”¹⁴ Simplus employees followed his lead. They also narrowed their focus, made sacrifices, and kept their efforts concentrated rather than diluted. Westwood hung a sign in his office that read “Simplus.” During meetings he would repeatedly point to it and say, “The main thing is the main thing.” Through intense focus, supported by uncounted “nos,” Westwood became a smart growth aficionado. After five years, Simplus sold for $250 million to Infosys. This success was not just a victory for Westwood; it transformed the lives of many of his employees. The company sale made it possible for families to buy homes and realize other dreams.

This kind of focus is a hallmark of the Metamorph. Transformation isn’t achieved if we repeatedly interrupt the process in the sweet spot. If we can’t focus and say no to new things, we risk becoming what George Leonard, author of the classic Mastery, labeled a “dabbler,” who “might think of himself as an adventurer, a connoisseur of novelty, but he’s probably closer to being what Carl Jung calls the puer aeternus, the eternal kid.” Constantly saying yes to novelty is also saying no to mastery and bidding the Metamorph opportunity goodbye.

The challenge with all this naysaying is that we say yes for good reasons. Yes facilitates relationships. It’s an essential word in a healthy ecosystem. But so is no, even though it’s hard to say. If you see yourself as a helper by nature, or expect yourself to say yes, then saying no is going to cost you emotionally. Or if others expect you to say yes, then the cost of saying no will be accepting that you disappoint other people, often people whose approval matters to you, or people whose approval you need, like a boss, an influential friend, or a future opportunity. Learning to say no can involve painful identity adjustments.

Perhaps that’s why I’m fascinated by the myth of Psyche, Greek goddess of the soul. Psyche’s heroic journey illustrates the trials and triumphs of metamorphosis. Psyche was born a mortal woman. After becoming separated from her husband, the god Eros, Psyche is given four tasks by Eros’s mother, Aphrodite. If Psyche successfully completes these tasks, she and Eros will be reunited. Initially Psyche is overcome with fear. She feels inadequate to accomplish any, much less all, of her tasks. But her cause is great. Psyche proceeds.

For the final task, Aphrodite directs Psyche to journey through the underworld, a fearsome and hazardous place, and fill a box with beauty ointment. Psyche is warned that she will encounter people who will beg for help and try to distract her. Psyche must say no if she hopes to accomplish her mission. Psyche triumphs. Psyche and Eros are reunited, and Eros spirits Psyche away to Mount Olympus, where she is made a goddess. If saying yes is to be anything more than mere obligation, we must say yes to what matters most to us (our values and why) and learn to say no to that which matters less. Learning to say no is part of maturing as a human being. Everyone will do it differently. But smart growth requires that everyone learn how to do it.

We need to stay focused if we are going to fly.

Pursue Optimized Tension

In the classic book The Courage to Create, Rollo May relates the story of a conference called “The Sky’s the Limit” in which luminaries from wide-ranging fields would explore “human possibilities.”

It turned out to be a dull affair. Many praises were sung to humanity’s future, but as for humanity’s present, no one would make specific commitments—financial commitments least of all. No one could agree on any new initiatives. When the conference finally broke up (to the relief of many), nothing substantive had been accomplished.¹⁵

“The sky’s the limit” has a catchy ring, but down-to-earth parameters are what you need to grow. A little friction helps promote movement. It would be better said as, “The Sky’s the Limit, but Gravity Is Good Too.” “The creative act arises out of the struggle of human beings with and against that which limits them,” May writes.¹⁶

To gain and maintain momentum in our transformation, what we need, and what characterizes the S Curve sweet spot for Metamorphs, is optimized tension. Of course, we are working to optimize tension at all points along the curve—if it’s too hard, it needs to be made easier, or if it’s too easy, it needs to be made harder, for example—but in the sweet spot, there is equilibrium. We have enough resources, but they aren’t so abundant that we don’t need to be resourceful—creative, innovative, persistent. We have enough expertise and capacity to make rapid progress, but not so much experience that we’re bored, disengaged from learning, and no longer growing. Staying in the sweet spot, fully capturing opportunity, means constantly focusing on balancing the forces that can make our curve too challenging, with those that make it too easy.

This includes experiencing enough stress, but not too much.¹⁷ Amy Arnsten, a neurobiologist researcher at Yale, has determined that you get the optimal level of stress, referred to as eustress, when you have the right level of two neurochemicals in your brain—dopamine and norepinephrine.¹⁸ If levels are too low, there are no signals being transmitted, no communication between neurons. If levels are too high, the system crashes. At optimal levels, there is enough novelty that our neurons have something to talk about, but not so much that we trip the circuit.

There is value in every part of the S Curve. We can build momentum regardless of where we are. But obviously, we want to be in the sweet spot, accelerating into transformation as frequently as possible, for as long as possible, because that’s where we are going to do our best work To do that we need to find that just-right level of stress.

But let’s be realistic: change can hurt. Though we crave growth, novelty, and freedom to roam, we also crave wish fulfillment. The effort and persistence required for smart growth do not always, or even often, come naturally to us. English Irish poet and philosopher David Whyte wryly observes that “one of the astonishing qualities of being human is the measure of our reluctance to be here, actually.” Whyte means all the ways you don’t want to be here as regards your work or your relationships, all the ways you don’t want to be here as a parent, as a leader. After all, adulting is tough.

Blaming yourself for your human nature, however, gets you nowhere. Whyte says, “I think self-compassion has to do with the ability to understand and even to cultivate a sense of humor about all the ways you just don’t want to be here. To embody your reluctance and … once it’s embodied, to allow it to actually start to change into something else.”¹⁹ This is metamorphosis. First, acknowledge your aversion, not necessarily to change itself, but to the hard work change demands. Second, start changing.

My second-great-grandfather, Ebenezer Bryce, was a nineteenth-century shipbuilder and immigrant from Scotland. He came to the United States as a young man in 1854, married Mary Park in Salt Lake City, Utah, and raised a large family. A few years into their marriage, Ebenezer was asked to build a chapel in a remote valley. This was building, his vocation, but not of ships, and became a moment of optimized tension—the successful leveraging of the old and new, the familiar and unknown.

The Pine Valley Chapel that Ebenezer built is still in use today, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and, remarkably, constructed like an upside-down ship. The chapel roof looks like a conventional roof, but the substructure is shaped like a ship’s hull. Ebenezer Bryce was a pioneer innovator and a disruptor.

With that challenge conquered, Ebenezer and his family next went homesteading in what is now Bryce Canyon National Park (named for him) in Utah, an otherworldly landscape of red-rock geological splendor, and as Ebenezer put it, “a hell of a place to lose a cow.”²⁰ Bryce Canyon was a far cry from Glasgow—in Glasgow, it rains. Undeterred, Ebenezer and Mary innovated, leveraging their old skills to maximize new resources. They grew, adapted, and made a wilderness blossom.

The Bryces would eventually establish the eponymous community in Arizona where they finished out their inspiring lives. To me, Ebenezer’s golden years embody the joy of metamorphosis. My ancestor was fully transformed, from a young Scottish shipbuilder to a seasoned American pioneer.

Once a caterpillar, now a butterfly.

This phase typically feels    

Metamorph Takeaways

The fourth stage of the S Curve of Learning is “Metamorph.” This stage is exciting because everything is working; it feels fast-paced compared to the earlier stages, and you are exhilarated by the combination of challenge, productivity, and growth. Similarly, your brain chemistry shifts from the headwinds of stress response to providing supportive dopamine rewards as your predictive model improves. This Metamorph phase of growth involves a shift in identity; the S Curve moves from being something you do (for example, “I exercise by running”) to increasingly becoming something you are (for example, “I’m a runner.”)

This stage in your smart growth requires focus and a concentration of energy. As a Metamorph, momentum is strong and there is still considerable room for growth. The fact that everything is working well presents a paradoxical challenge. You may feel you are done; you may feel like jumping to a new S Curve, but now is the time to focus and concentrate your energy on the task at hand, so you understand your growth and shape it. The better your grasp of how growth is achieved, the greater your capacity to affect it. Here are five lenses to help sustain your focus—techniques to concentrate your energies so you can maintain momentum:

• Focus lens 1—Stay in the moment. You have the resources available, and the competence to utilize them, but success requires staying focused on the present moment, and being deliberate about what you focus on. You can consciously help accelerate your growth when you give your attention to the right things. Focus, so you can fly.
• Focus lens 2—Triumph over your triggers. The pain or loss that you have experienced—especially in childhood—can be easily triggered and derail your focus. These emotional triggers can sap your confidence and leave you vulnerable to discouragement in ways that can slow the momentum of your growth. Pretending you don’t have triggers only increases their destructive power. But you can triumph over them. Successful people consciously know their triggers and have plans to minimize or work around them, and find healing and acceptance in meaningful ways.
• Focus lens 3—Healthy body, sharp mind. Maintaining focus through the excitement and distractions of this phase requires a sharp mind. Your body is the best whetstone to sharpen your mind, so what you eat, how you sleep, and how often you exercise all have a significant contribution to your focus. A healthy body helps your brain be its best self.
• Focus lens 4—Say no to yes. The faster pace and exciting results of this stage will open doors to more opportunities. But increased opportunity can also increase the distraction from your main purpose. The few new opportunities to consider are those that directly contribute toward the goals of this S Curve. All others become a diversion that will slow the hard-won momentum you’ve started to experience. The Metamorph says no to distractions and yes to accelerating momentum on the S Curve.
• Focus lens 5—Pursue optimized tension. While you may fantasize about days free of any tension, your growth is maximized in conditions of optimized tension—you have enough resources, but not so many that you don’t need to be resourceful, creative, innovative, and persistent. You have enough expertise and capacity to make rapid progress, but not so much that you’re bored, disengaged from learning, and no longer growing. This is the good kind of stress: high levels of novelty but not enough to trip a circuit.

Make the most of the sweet spot for as long as possible, because that’s where you are going to do your best work. This is where the magic happens, where caterpillars become butterflies.