4 Underrated High-Achievement Factors No Skill Can Be Compared To
Jeff Bezos: without these factors, skills are useless.
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Skills mania is more realistic than ever. The pandemic has accelerated the demands for a more skilled, chameleonic workforce. And everywhere you look around, people show interest in learning new skills or sharpen those they already have.
More than ever, high-skilled people are associated with high achievements in business and professional success. But unlike everything and everyone, after decades of new standards, one of the most successful companies thinks in a different way: skills are a secondary piece in the high-achievement puzzle.
Amazon made his point of view known in its 2017 letter to shareholders, in which Jeff Bezos outlined his principles to stay ahead of ever-rising customer expectations.
Clinical Awareness
A friend of Bezos’ once decided to learn how to do a perfect handstand. She took a handstand workshop. But after a while, she was still far from the results she wanted. So she hired a handstand coach, who gave her some eye-opener advice:
“Most people think that if they work hard, they should be able to master a handstand in about two weeks. The truth is, it takes about six months of daily practice. If you plan to do it in two weeks, you will end up quitting.”
That coach knew one thing well: people tend to overestimate themselves. It happens in any aspect of life: personal, professional, and even for a handstand.
Deep confidence leads people to set unrealistic, highly optimistic goals, which makes them quit. This is why aiming at the highest achievements without an accurate awareness kills high achievements and makes skills lose meaning.
On the other hand, realistic goals are specific and measurable. And they also often consider not discussed obstacles, like overconfidence and demotivation.
Clinical awareness starts with recognizing how high standards look like in that domain and continues setting realistic expectations — especially on the time and effort required to pursue them.
Metrics
At Amazon, awareness comes from clinical data analysis. Data creates clarity and shapes every decision. In every field, whatever it is.
Bezos turned to data-driven decision-making when he was a child. And since then, he has never come back.
At 10, he wanted his grandmother to stop smoking because he checked the numbers. “You’ve taken nine years off your life!” he told her. Today, since 1994, that perspective has ruled Amazon.
For instance, electronics systems dictate parking times per hour, and employees are responsible for an impressive amount of metrics reviewed in weekly or monthly sessions called business reviews.
Answers like “We’re not totally sure” or “I’ll get back to you” are not acceptable, because, for high achievements, there can be no awareness without measurement. And most importantly, there can be no improvement.
Prolific Environment
The environment is one of the leading inputs of human behaviors, reactions, and sensations.
Since childhood, the environment determines our personality, attitudes, and routines. And it impacts our bodies in different ways: affecting health and stress levels more than we could ever think.
People who are part of our environment can strengthen or stimulate new habits or behaviors. The spaces around us help shape the way we think and learn. And our home, as well as our workplace, can have a considerable impact on our health.
People
In the letter, Bezos refers to environment writing:
“People are pretty good at learning high standards simply through exposure. High standards are contagious. Bring a new person onto a high standards team, and they will quickly adapt. The opposite is also true. If low standards prevail, those too will quickly spread.”
In recent years, researchers have brought to light a phenomenon dubbed social contagion. They found people most present in our life have more influence than we think on our behaviors, habits, and decision-making processes.
Said plainly, friends and family can influence our minds consciously or not. For example, they have the power to make us healthier, or, on the contrary, to lead us into wrong behaviors: such as smoking or drinking alcohol.
It is not just explicit pressure: it can be more subtle, an influence often cited as “invisible”, that the brain takes into account during the decision-making process.
Home and Workspace
It has also become evident that spaces have a measurable impact on the human mind and behavior. The home and workspace –being the places where you spend most of your time– play a fundamental role in this sense.
The same room you are in at this exact moment is exerting an influence on your behavior. It could make you distracted, extremely productive, tired, or it could particularly affect your cognitive processes.
The simplest example is when you set your smartphone as an alarm clock. The alarm blares. You turn it off. And most likely at that point, you checked what you missed while you were sleeping, ending up spending the first precious minutes of the day scrolling on your social media feed.
Mind
The thought that could come up is that high achievements are impossible to achieve without an ideal environment. In reality, scientific research suggests that some individuals can keep their mental processes highly effective despite external forces.
Of course, how we perceive the environment around us is stored in our minds and relates past experiences with present perception. But the difference in how you think and how strongly you do it is a protection against all external inputs.
And the impact of environmental inputs becomes nothing more than a strengthening stimulus for decision-making processes.
Top-Quartile Culture
For a company or an individual, culture drives performance. And according to McKinsey, a top-quartile culture produces a return between 60 and 200% higher than those in other quartiles.
Bezos has always seen it this way: building a high standard culture is worth every effort and has various benefits. It helps to build better services, products, and more importantly, protects all-important but crucial work that no one sees.
There is no culture suitable for everyone, but there is the right culture for every environment. As it is not just about the attitude of raising the bar every time. But it is also the emotional state that one experiences and breathes in an environment.
For example, Google and Amazon are two of the most successful companies in the world, but they have two opposite cultures. If the first one is fun and flexible, the second one is brutal.
At Amazon, it is not easy to work. Pressure is high because of the reasonable high standards. And there are no compromises: it would be more socially cohesive, but they could lead to the wrong decision. Some people combust, and many of them cry over the desk.
It is a gladiator culture, but despite that, even former employees have recognized it as a success factor for their careers. And Amazon remains one of the most coveted companies to work for.
Again: culture is not universal, it is tailor-made. There is no single culture suitable for every company or a single individual. In reverse, each environment, person, or company has its own culture in which it performs at its best.
Domain-Specific Focus
Competence is domain-specific. And problem-solving as critical thinking is specific knowledge.
In plain words: having developed expertise in a particular area of interest does not imply having acquired it elsewhere.
“Understanding this point is important because it keeps you humble,” Bezos said. But there is more than that. It is also a concept of efficiency.
Developing high standards in every area of interest takes time. And unlike the simplistic idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in any field, each environment requires its time-baggage to become an expert.
The trap in a generalist approach is thinking possible to develop world-class expertise anywhere, with the real risk of dedicating time to many areas of interest without making substantial progress in anyone.
Conversely, a reduced focus on specific, essential domain areas has enormous advantages.
Not only does an expert develop expertise in his or her field the more efficient he is in processing and assimilating complex information, but also his cognitive load in decision-making and problem-solving is reduced, allowing him to generate outcomes more efficiently than a generalist can ever do.
