How to Focus on What Matters Most: 5 Leaders' Effective Strategies

Where am I conflating momentum with what's meaningful? [music] How much of my time is serving the things I [music] actually want versus the things I should be doing? Welcome to Meet the Leader, the podcast where top leaders [music] share how they're tackling the world's toughest challenges. This week's special episode asks researchers, [music] an adventurer, an artist, and a Buddhist monk how you can focus on what matters most. Subscribe to Meet the Leader on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you [music] get your favorite podcasts. And don't forget, rate and review us. I'm Linda Lina from the World Economic Forum. And this is Meet the Leader. >> You have to do behavioral change, change your environment, and then you can change your thinking [music] and and your mental habit. It's summertime. Have you taken your vacation yet? And if you took that vacation, did you ever put your phone down? Could you stop scanning for emails and Slack notifications and little things with your name on them? Those things are going to be there when you get back. I [music] promise. I've done it, too. It's hard to stop, retrain our brains, take a moment to reflect, but those moments are critical, not just to avoiding burnout, but to [music] helping us keep a fresh perspective, to help us make better decisions. We have been so lucky this year to talk to a range of incredible experts who are perfectly poised [music] for this critical topic. How to find time for reflection so you can refocus on what matters most. Leaders in this episode will share research and insights and strategies. And they're all things that you can deploy to help refind your center when things go sideways. We'll get started with Hiroimoto. Hiroimoto is a blind adventurer and together with his sighted navigator and crew mate Doug Smith, they completed the first ever non-stop crossing of the Pacific Ocean by a visually impaired person. You might remember them from last week's Meet the Leader episode where my colleague Robin Pomeroy talked to them about that extraordinary journey and what surprised them about spending 55 days with just the ocean below them and the stars above. They found it liberating and the journey helped drive home to them that life's real necessities, everything they needed was really on that boat. It's a great reminder to anyone to ask yourself, "What do I really need in this moment? And do I have it already?" Here's Doug and Hero. We're on a boat and you know, you didn't have the constant ding-ding of your phone and the message coming in. You know, everything you needed was there on the boat. Um, someone asked me, he's like, "Didn't you feel lonely um or scared in the middle of ocean?" And I think both of us and no, we felt more connected and and our course took us where, you know, there was not a lot of boat traffic or any traffic. I mean, the closest people on Earth, they weren't on Earth. They were probably in a space station uh above. So, I think we both found it kind of liberating to um feeling to to be out there to be self-sufficient, you know, uh to be separated from the world and not have the constant noise of news or your your device dinging at you. >> It sounds glorious. I want to do it now. Uh yeah, of course, you know, there were times where you have big storms and you know, things happen, things break and they need to get repaired, but that that was expected. So it wasn't uh >> so step by step, right? when something happens definitely on the s sell sailing acret the Pacific but step by step how to figure out >> and good time to have a dialogue with yourself >> and with uh universe excellent you know and feeling why this world has a war polarization or uh clim climate crisis you know in this on the middle of the Pacific I feel this earth is one thing. Right. >> Right. >> Yeah. So feeling very well. So instead of those, you know, difficult time, excellent time, you know, I uh what I re remember the most. Yeah. That's you talked about the the space station maybe being closer to you than uh humans on Earth. You you you you seem to have had an experience, both of you, similar to what astronauts have when they look down on Earth and this feeling of it's this precious place and uh and and we forget about it all too often. >> Yeah. And it felt like we were because we're sailing in the trade wind. So you go for a long time, the sun is rising behind you in the morning, setting you in the afternoon, so you're continually setting, you know, sailing into the sun and you get this feeling. It's like well you this could have been 10,000 years ago or 100,000 years ago or 10,000 years from now. You felt like you're in some ways stepping out of time. So after landing you know I was shocked then uh when I went to you know the big stores and supermarket things are everything and too much things and how materialistic this world became you know what we needed is what we put on the sailboat that's it 55 days we could have gone 90 days 100 days you know so this were you know the different way to see we had through the selling across the Pacific. Yeah. >> Jonathan height is a social psychologist and an expert on human flourishing. In fact, he's taught a course on that topic for the last 12 years at New York University. He was a guest on Meet the Leader this year talking about human happiness and how tech distraction and fragmentation get in the way of that. He shares with us a simple tip to help you take back control of your day and of your mornings. One that starts with your devices. I'll let him explain. >> What habits can you develop with your phone to increase your chances of flourishing? One thing that I've learned from teaching undergraduates and MBA students in their late 20s is that almost all young people and a lot of older people, the very first thing they do when they wake up in the morning is check their phone for notifications. They don't get out of bed. They don't go to the bathroom. Uh they don't make coffee. It's the phone. And what's the last thing they do before they close their eyes at night? Same thing. It's the phone. And what do they do in between? For a lot of them, mostly it's the phone. That is not a life. That is not a life with relationships. That means you are never fully present in human interactions. So, one of the things that I strongly encourage all of my students to do and I encourage all adults to do, make a list of the first five things you do after you open your eyes and look at it and say, "Is that really what I want?" And find ways to change it. Make a list of the last five things you do before you close your eyes and look at it. Is that really what you want? And what everyone finds is when they do that, when they give themselves space to wake up and to set the day and to choose what they want to happen that day, set your intentions, you have a much better day. If you don't do that, you open your eyes, you look at your phone, and your phone will now control your thinking, your cognition, your thoughts, your priorities, and your actions for the rest of the day. You'll constantly be interrupted. You'll never have deep work, and you won't really amount to anything. So willpower is overmatched. Willpower is not enough. You can't just say, "I'm going to look at my phone less." You can't just say, "I'm going to be present in my social." No, you cannot. That's not enough. The phones, the apps are designed by people who studied behaviorism. They studied gambling and gaming addiction. They used techniques from Las Vegas in designing these apps. And they are too strong for our willpower. Uh, as Angela Duckworth writes, she's the of the book Grit, you have to do behavioral change, change your environment, and then you can change your thinking and and your mental habit. >> At Davos this year, chist Yoyo Ma curated an inspirational conversation on how leaders can live in balance with the planet. It's a pretty incredible session, and it's one that stopped me cold when it played in our staff office in January during the annual meeting. You can watch it on your own. I'll have a link in the show notes. But there was a moment in the session where Yoyo Ma asked Olani Wilhelm, the CEO of nonprofit Natero, an organization that supports indigenous peoples and their guardianship of lands and waters, all about the idea of ancestors and being a steward of our environments and the impact we have on others. It's an enlightening chat that can help you think about urgency differently and ask yourself, how can I be an ancestor? How can I think about the long term? Here's Alani. Your father is Swiss. >> He's frombach, a town with no railroad. And your mother is native Hawaiian. And Alani has devoted her life to advocate for the well-being and to spread the wisdoms of indigenous peoples. And that is one out of 20 people on our planet. One out of 20. So that's a big job. How do you think of time of big time of generational time of the time that that um how do you think about that time when we have to live in the moment in a very unstable and fast changing world? How do you negotiate the two? I am Native Hawaiian and I was fortunate to be raised primarily [clears throat] in the homeland of my mother um and in her culture. And in that culture um we learn very young that we're descended from nature that our oldest kin are non-human uh relations that we're the younger siblings um of the of what we now refer to as the natural world. But it's who we are. We are nature. But my father is Swiss and he is from Stafelbach in Canton Argal. Um, and it's really wonderful because I have those ancestors as well. And the funny thing is is even though my parents came from literally halfway around the world, they both came from extraordinarily humble means, they actually both came from farming families and, you know, fishing families in my in my mom's case. And the only thing they ever argued about was time. If we weren't 10 minutes early, we were late for my dad. And if we weren't one hour late, we were early for my mom. And the role my brother and I always had to play was straddling these worlds, right? Actually trying to figure out how to stretch and navigate time so that we'd have peace in our family and we could actually get anywhere at some point and kind of understand the nuances of that. And so literally in me is like this kind of holding of time. And what I learned from my you know my Hawaiian family is that we sort of say oh it's okay like relax calm down ancestors will stretch time like you will have the time you need to be able to do what's at hand right and that for me is like that poetic way of that tension between the urgent and the important or like you know something having to do it in today right now. This one thing has to be done, but you have to be mindful of where we're going in the future. >> Shok Matsumoto is a Buddhist monk and the author of several books, including work like a monk, how to connect, lead, and grow in a noisy world. Sh uses ancient wisdom to help people find meaning in the modern world. He also talked about thinking like an ancestor, but his focus was on how we can be better stewards of our attention so we can better appreciate the present. I'll let him explain exactly how to do that. >> So if you want to be a good ancestor of yesterday's you, you need to have an agency. If you give up your um autonomy on how you manage your attention, you cannot do anything right. Uh you will be just uh swiped away by overwhelming wave of attention economy and politics. Right? To become a good ancestor, it is really important to first number one, you need to be owner of your own attention. To be an owner of your attention, you need to be grounded in the first place. So before start speaking, stay calm and start listening mindfully to your own voice. Then to others voices. But remember this present moment is the point where every course of future, every course of the past is unfolded. Start appreciating the present. So this is a very important you know starting point whatever you do. >> To take us home we have Slea Jad. She is a memoirist and best-selling author of The Book of Alchemy. That's a special guide to journaling with prompts and essays that help people take time to reflect on moments and questions that they wouldn't otherwise. She's also a three-time cancer survivor. Journaling helped her through many tough moments, including living with that disease. Here's Clea on journaling and how this creative process helped her. >> I believe that a creative practice is beneficial for everyone. You don't have to be a professional writer or musician or poet to benefit from its power. But when you think about it, creativity is the undernetting of everything that we do. Cooking is creative. Negotiating a deal requires creativity. Um, making a sacrifice and um having an argument with your spouse requires creativity. And so exercising that muscle of creativity in a context that isn't for public consumption. Uh taking a moment each day to sit down to write or doodle or make a list and find your way back to yourself. That to me is the starting point of every good idea, every first draft of an important conversation. And it is the bedrock of uh not just my work um and and my ability to keep enduring and surviving uh but more than that to to keep living to live well to live intentionally to live meaningfully to live uh a life that doesn't feel like drowning in uncertainty but instead is a life of curiosity of asking questions of reflecting and taking talk. >> I also asked her how in a world where we're so comfortable prompting AI and search engines, why we should stand to ask ourselves some questions in the process. Here's answer. >> We live in a culture that is obsessed with, as the journalist David Brooks put it, our resume virtues, the things that make us attractive in the common marketplace. We're less focused on the eulogy virtues, on cultivating the traits that were often remembered for long after we're gone. Were you brave? Were you humble? Were you kind? And I think it's so easy in this modern day to tumble through your life to be focused on doing as opposed to being without actually taking a moment to reflect on what it is that you're thinking, what it is that you're feeling and experiencing. And so to me, even one minute, even a sentence is valuable. It's to paraphrase the poet TS Elliott, a way of finding a still point in the spinning world. What I found that may seem counterintuitive is that when I shift away from being productive, when I begin my day with a to feel list rather than a to-do list, which is one of the prompts from the book of alchemy that I return to every day, um it changes my mindset as I approach the rest of my day. It sets the tone for everything. And we are giving prompts all the time often in the context of AI. But to prompt the self [snorts] is to take a moment to slow things just enough that you can ask yourself what actually matters to me today. Are my priorities really my priorities? uh what would make this day meaningful as opposed to productive? How much of my time is serving the things I actually want versus the things I should be doing? >> Lastly, I asked her what questions she's asking herself these days. >> Where am I conflating momentum with what's meaningful? It's so easy to confuse busyiness with a sense of progress. And as someone who is an admittedly pretty type A, um, when I'm doing a lot, it feels like forward motion. But the ability sometimes to pause uh to take a moment to actually reflect about what I'm doing and why and where it's taking me sometimes can be the most productive unproductive use of time. And so as we're here at Davos and having questions and and conversations uh specifically for example about AI and there is this race to innovate um and very [music] real questions about the implications of that race for humankind, [music] for our workforce, for our artists. Um, I think that the focus on meaning over momentum and and specifically [music] defining the the why of the momentum and the why of what's meaningful um is [music] something that I know I could benefit from and that I believe others could too. Those were the top tips on how to focus on what matters most. Thanks so much to [music] these leaders and thanks so much to you for listening. Do you know someone who could use a couple more strategies to reflect and focus? Send them this episode. They'll be grateful. We have full [music] podcast conversations with many of the leaders in this episode. Leaders like social psychologist Jonathan Height, writer Sele Jad, and adventurer Hero Iumoto. Put the links in the show notes. Find a transcript of this episode as well as transcripts [music] from my colleagues podcast radio davos at west.chodcasts. This episode of Meet the Leader was produced and presented by me with Taz Kellaher as editor, Juan Teran and Edward Bailey [music] as studio engineers in Davos and Gareth Nolan driving studio production. That's it for now. I'm Linda Lina from the World Economic [music] Forum. Have a great day.