I’ve spent more time than I care to admit trying to find and fix what was broken.
That’s not just me. It’s the default operating mode for pretty much every organization I’ve ever encountered. Performance reviews catalog deficiencies. Report cards circle the C. Quality programs measure deviation from standard. The whole apparatus of modern institutional life is built around gap analysis: find what’s wrong, close the gap, repeat.
It seems rational. It’s also mostly wrong.
I’ve been sitting with a new piece by Marcus Buckingham in HBR that makes this case with more rigor than I can. The short version: the relationship between experience and outcome isn’t linear. It’s curvilinear. Dramatically so.
Most leaders assume that moving something from bad to mediocre produces roughly the same lift as moving it from mediocre to good. The data says no. The real jump in performance, loyalty, and engagement only happens at the extreme positive end. Getting from a 4 to a 5 isn’t an increment. It’s a category change.
Which means all the energy we pour into raising the floor returns almost nothing.
Buckingham has been circling this idea for decades. His work with Donald Clifton at Gallup — what became CliftonStrengths — landed one of the most counterintuitive findings in organizational psychology: people don’t grow by shoring up their weaknesses. They grow by developing their strengths to exceptional. Don’t try to be well-rounded. Get pointy.
Same principle. Different scale.
And before Buckingham and Clifton, there was Jerry Sternin. In 1990, Save the Children sent Sternin to Vietnam with a brief to reduce childhood malnutrition. The Vietnamese government gave him six months. He arrived to find a country where most young children were undernourished, for reasons that were real and intractable and essentially impossible to fix in half a year.
Sternin called the conventional analysis TBU. True, but useless.
So instead of working on the problem, he went looking for the kids who weren’t malnourished. In every village he visited, even the poorest, there were a handful of children who were thriving. He found their mothers and asked what they were doing differently.
Small things. Adding shrimp and field greens to the rice. Feeding smaller portions more often. Staying with the kids while they ate. All of it already available to everyone in the village. Just not being done.
Within six months he had improved health outcomes for children across fourteen villages. Chip and Dan Heath later told this story in Switch under a chapter called “Find the Bright Spots.” Don’t analyze the failure. Find what’s already working and replicate it.
The same arrow. Pointing the same direction.
So what is it that lives at the top of that curve? Buckingham has been listening to people describe it for three decades, and they all reach for the same word.
Love.
Not satisfaction. Not engagement. Love.
Employees say “I loved working on that team.” Customers say “I love that they know me there.” And when he traces why, it always comes back to the same thing: the experience let them put their armor down. They got to be more fully themselves.
This is where I’m reminded of Csikszentmihalyi’s work. Flow is what Buckingham’s “love” feels like from the inside. Fully immersed, fully present, time dissolved. You and the thing you’re doing become one. The armor doesn’t just come down. You forget it ever existed.
I’ve been spending the last couple years trying to do this for myself. Dropping delusions. Getting honest about who I actually am rather than who I thought I should be. Less comfortable than it sounds, more useful than I expected. What I’ve found is that the places in my life where I’ve felt most alive aren’t the places where I worked hardest on my weaknesses. They’re the places I brought everything I had to the things I already loved.
