Read 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done for Free Online Page B

starting. It wasn’t until 2002 and 2003 that AdWords and AdSense became the company’s moneymaking platform.
    In a few chapters, I’ll address the importance of staying flexible and the dangers of sticking too closely to your plan. But what if you have no plan?
    That’s the situation so many of us face—not just when we graduate but throughout our lives. Even those who grew up in the generation that stayed with a company thirty years are now, thankfully, living long enough to have second and third careers. And the younger generation is switching jobs every few years, often changing careers entirely. My yoga teacher used to be a casting director. Yesterday’s plan may not apply today.
    The limitless options we encounter make it difficult to create a plan. In a study led by Sheena Iyengar, a management professor at Columbia University Business School, one group of people was presented with samples of six different jams available for purchase while another group was presented with twenty-four different jams. The twenty-four-jam group showed much greater interest when sampling, but the six-jam group was ten times more likely toactually purchase a jam. We’re ten times more likely to take action when choice is limited!
    It’s easy to become paralyzed when so many choices exist. We can’t decide among them so we end up not choosing.
    But life goes on, and no choice becomes the de facto choice, and suddenly we look back and feel like our talents have been wasted. We leave the store without buying any jam at all.
    We need a way to get started
now
, to move in the right direction, even when we don’t have a plan.
    So what makes people like Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin so successful? Some of it is opportunity. Some of it is persistence. And some is sheer luck. But there’s another set of ingredients that encourages opportunity, persistence, and luck. I call them the four elements. The four behaviors around which you should shape your next year:
    1. Leverage your strengths.
    2. Embrace your weaknesses.
    3. Assert your differences.
    4. Pursue your passions.
    Zuckerberg, Page, and Brin loved technology and were great with it. None of them operated alone—they partnered with people to complement their weaknesses. And in style as well as substance, they offered unique approaches that differentiated them and their companies from anything else out there.
    For me, at Princeton, it was outdoor leadership. My strength was group dynamics. My weakness—a neurotic safety consciousness—was an asset in this situation. I loved being with others in the outdoors. And having grown up in New York City, my urban outlook brought a unique perspective to teaching people who were also new to the outdoors.
    Still, I had no idea how I was supposed to turn any of that into gainful employment. I couldn’t see how it would provide a career for me in the long term. I couldn’t see raising a family while living in the woods. It was far from perfect. So I almost threw it all out. I almost went to law school.
    But I didn’t. Instead, I chose to stick with what I was doing, experimenting to improve my focus on the four elements while changing those things that detracted from them.
    One thing I experimented with was doing outdoor team building with corporate groups. I could do that while living a more stable life. And it leveraged my differences even more—I knew more about the corporate world than most others in outdoor leadership.
    So I started a company. One decision led to another. Eighteen years later, I’m still changing my business, morphing it to take better advantage of my strengths, weaknesses, differences, and passions. What will it look like in three years? I’m not sure.
    The entire path need not be clear. Most successful people and businesses have meandered their way to successby exercising their talents in ways they never would have imagined at the outset.
    Here’s what’s fortunate: You’re already doing