Over the past week change has come at me hard and fast. My normal routines are gone along with the regularity they once brought.

So I’ve found myself turning inward. Not in an excessive, touchy-feely way, but in a way that has encouraged mindfulness and meditative clarity.

Lately I’ve been making a conscious effort to step back from all the doing and striving and goal-oriented behavior and am approaching things with a beginner’s mind.

Not judging or imposing my thoughts upon what I’m experiencing, but simply experiencing things as they come. It’s difficult to do, and when we’re children and everything is so bright and interesting and new, it requires no special effort to find that space. As we grow older, finding that clarity requires concentration and focus.

It’s easy to get pulled into our mind’s ongoing internal editorials, streams of consciousness of thinking and rumination that can quickly come to dominate one’s daily existence. That’s how we begin to lose touch with the reality of our situation.

Our success is often defined by our ability to act, not react. Establishing mental distance through mindfulness allows us to move beyond being a pawn on the chessboard. With focus, reflective clarity and inquiry, we become the grandmaster that sees the board of our lives from above.

There is brilliance in execution, but how many times have we mistaken it for innovation or creativity?

Apple’s success lies not in its ability to innovate, though it certainly does that, but in its capacity to achieve supreme alignment in the products it produces. This is execution.

Diamond Multimedia released its portable Rio MP3 player in 1998. HP and Microsoft were showcasing tablet technology as early as 2001. Sony began selling ultra-thin laptops in 2004.

Execution is the ability to focus and discipline one’s efforts into making a product or delivering a service where all elements align into an elegant, effective whole that, by virtue of its quality, provides exceptional value to the customer or client.

The iPod, the iPad, and the MacBook Air are products greater than the sum of their constituent parts.

Sure, it’s sexier to talk about how prescient Steve Jobs is, how creative and unexpected the minds at Apple are. But what if Apple simply pays obsessive, neurotic, disciplined attention to every facet of what it’s doing, afflicted with a drive to perfect that goes beyond the competition, inspired by forces outside the market to execute brilliantly because there simply is no other way?

The technologies Apple has based its growth upon are not unique to the company. What Jobs & Co. did differently was to look at these technologies not as random bells and whistles but as notes on a musical scale that could work in harmony.

The next time you’re confronted with a problem, consider execution as much as you consider innovation. You might be surprised by what you find.

Note: This post was inspired by an interview with Jim Collins that can be found here

Every day we’re at war with ourselves. Stoicism, the Hellenistic philosophy, is my most useful weapon in combatting the enemy of Resistance, the negative force that impedes our climb toward greatness.

With Jim Collins’s book Built to Last being a recent nightstand fixture of mine, while reading it, I recalled the story of Vice Admiral Jim Stockdale as told by Collins in another of his bestsellers, Good to Great. Stockdale flew the first sorties into North Vietnam and was shot down early in the conflict. He was imprisoned in the “Hanoi Hilton” for eight years.

I’ve linked to a video of bestselling author Steven Pressfield in the first paragraph. In the video, Pressfield discusses Resistance and how to overcome it. While writing this post, I also learned that he is a reader and devotee of Collins’s work. He mentions Good to Great as the second favorite book of (after Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations) Marine general Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis, who was appointed head of United States Central Command in August 2010.

While writing Good to Great, Collins had the opportunity to meet Stockdale. From their conversation, Collins took away a very important lesson he later included in the book. Stockdale related to Collins the following about his time in prison in Vietnam:

I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.

Stockdale, however, made a point of distinguishing faith from optimism. As Collins explains:

I didn’t say anything for many minutes, and we continued the slow walk toward the faculty club, Stockdale limping and arc-swinging his stiff leg that had never fully recovered from repeated torture. Finally, after about a hundred meters of silence, I asked, “Who didn’t make it out?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “The optimists.”

“The optimists? I don’t understand,” I said, now completely confused, given what he’d said a hundred meters earlier.

“The optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”

Another long pause, and more walking. Then he turned to me and said, “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

What separates people, Stockdale says, is not the presence or absence of difficulty, but how individuals deal with the inevitable difficulties of life.

The Stockdale Paradox effortlessly captures this. It is a signature of greatness in people and organizations, corporations, even nations (think Great Britain during WWII, under the leadership of Winston Churchill). Adversity strengthens the soul and hardens the body. It strips away the noise and clutter of life and allows the mind to focus on what will have the most impact.

It’s not enough to believe you will simply survive. You must believe in your ability to prevail.

Collins never explicitly raises the issue of philosophy or Stoicism, but there it is, on paper, in one of the most articulate, actionable, understandable, applicable iterations I’ve ever seen.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is one of my favorite Stoic texts. In confronting the more mundane of life’s difficulties, I often refer back to the following quotation:

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.

The depth of Stoic thought fills books and spans generations, and has influenced modern day leaders like President Bill Clinton, who named it his favorite book. I hope you get the chance to explore this wonderful school of philosophy and learn from it. I certainly have. 

I love to visit bookstores, though on occasion I feel guilty for spending so much money inside them. I can hear my mother now, telling me I could find these titles for half price used on Amazon or eBay. But there’s an impalpable seductive quality to new books, the pages unruffled and pure that keeps me coming back. I think it could also be the coffee.

I’ve of late been putting an inordinate amount of time into philosophical texts. My current literary victim is Nassim Nicholas Taleb and his book, The Black Swan. The Wall Street Journal noted that “he writes in a style that owes as much to Stephen Colbert as it does to Michel de Montaigne.” I would have to agree.

Taleb’s black swan is in academia also referred to as a fat tail, and is the outlier that reintroduces luck and serendipity into the social sciences. Taleb seeks to explain the high impact, “impossible” events that defy our expectations of the material world and so take on the garb of a Power Law distribution. He as well examines humanity’s psychological bias and blindness toward such rare events, and in doing so seeks to answer why we’re so susceptible and blind to them.

Broadly the cognitive bias and, more specifically, the confirmation bias prove problematic as we try to understand the world we live in. By means of naïve empiricism we bipedal thinking things have a tendency to look for instances that confirm the narratives and stories and Platonic understandings of our world. The problem of course is that if you look for confirmation you can find it almost anywhere. Taleb argues that instead of deluding ourselves into thinking we’ve just aroused evidence for our correctness, we should rather scrape and claw and unearth those instances where our method or theory or course of action fails. It’s at that juncture that we actually learn something.

I’m going to try something different this time around and throw the question out to you, my readers. When have you found yourself susceptible to confirmation bias? Or, when you have taken the empiricist’s path and avoided the confirmation bias, and sought to falsify your theory rather than confirm it?