A deconstruction is basically a shift from superficiality. You see most people stuck in the majority, the 95%. It’s not a judgment. It’s just an observation. When you say, “Why are you healthy?” or “What’s your winning formula?” or “What are the five best lessons of your life?” or “What’s the philosophy you bring to the leadership table?” or “What does the next 100 years of your life look like?” With some of my clients, we actually do a 100-year timeline, and then we reverse engineer it to today and, literally, it’s a reverse sequencing. I’ve learnt this from some of the people I worked with in Silicon Valley. You start with your future 100 years and you reverse engineer and reverse sequence it to today so you know exactly what needs to happen.
But all I’m suggesting to you is you talk to most people and you say, “What’s your favorite
book?” “What needs to happen this year for this to be the single greatest year of your life?” Or you ask them, “What happens on your best days to make you feel the fire? To make you have so much focus in a world of dramatic distraction? To help you outproduce your industry peers?” And they say, “I don’t know.” Great question.
All I’m suggesting to you with great love and respect is one of the things about the 95%, a lot of them are complaining, they’re making excuses, they want epic lives, but they’re stuck in the cult of superficiality. The top 5%, the titans, the icons, the A-players, the world builders are very different. They are not about superficiality. They are all about granularity. Literally, they have de-seeded the lemon wedges.
This is a metaphor that I teach. Basically, I was at a hotel in Lucerne in Switzerland, and I love
fresh lemon tea. And when they brought the tray to me, I noticed that in the tray was two lemon halves. Someone in the kitchen had taken the time to de-seed the lemon wedges. They actually de-seeded them. And when I study F1 team, and what I realize is F1 almost like no other sport is really about de-seeding the lemon wedges. It was the smallest, granular detail, the smallest calibration that could make the difference between a top one and a 10th-place finish.