On Intensity and Constancy

There was a moment, not long ago, when my body forced me to stop. It was a scare, the kind that asks no permission and refuses to be postponed until after the next deliverable. For a few days, the only thing left to me was to think. And thinking, for someone in the habit of acting, is a form of exile.

It was in that exile that I understood something I had been avoiding for years: the intensity that had always served me so well might also be the bill I kept putting off.

There is a certain kind of mind that runs ahead. One that sees the end of a project before its beginning, that grows bored with routine the way one grows bored in a windowless room, that decides quickly and bristles when the world is slow. I know that mind intimately. I have lived with it for four decades.

For a long time, I thought the problem was one of character and discipline. The corporate literature loves that narrative: all you need is a productivity system, an app, a little more willpower. But willpower applied against one's own nature is not virtue; it is wear. And wear, I learned, carries a cost the body usually collects.

Constancy is not the opposite of intensity

The discovery I care to share is not that one should "abandon intensity." That would be to amputate the very thing that, in me, always made the difference. The discovery is subtler, and for that reason harder.

Intensity is a resource. And resources run dry when spent without judgment. The mistake I made for years was not being intense; it was being intense all the time, in everything, indiscriminately. I treated the trivial meeting and the decision that changes a company with the same voltage. I burned, in routine meetings, the fuel I should have saved for the few moments that truly matter.

This demands a kind of constancy that is not the constancy of the clock. It is not doing the same thing every day at the same hour. It is the constancy of purpose: knowing what you are saving your energy for, and having the discipline not to squander it before its time. Constancy, for an intense mind, may be less a matter of regularity than a matter of aim.

What this has to do with organizations

Everything, in fact. Every organization carries minds that do not fit the mold. People who think differently, who grow bored with repetitive process, who question rules no one asked them to question, who deliver unevenly but who, at certain moments, produce what no one else could. And the institutional temptation is almost always the same one I had with myself: to correct. To tame. To fit them into the flow, the spreadsheet, the average pace.

There is an invisible cost to that correction. When an organization asks everyone to be equally constant, equally methodical, equally predictable, it is asking its most intense minds to become average. And average minds produce average results. The price of homogeneity never shows up on the balance sheet, but it is there — in the innovation that never came, the risk no one dared to take, the idea that died because the environment rewarded only those who arrived on time and followed the script.

The more honest question, it seems to me, is not "how do we get these people to adjust?" It is: "how do we build an environment in which their intensity is orchestrated rather than wasted?"

Orchestrate is the word. An orchestra does not ask the trumpet to sound like the violin. It asks each instrument to enter at the right moment, at the right intensity, in service of a shared score. The conductor does not correct the trumpet's nature, he positions it. There are silences written for the trumpet as important as its notes. And there is the instant, a single instant in the whole symphony — when only the trumpet will do.

Jobs's toast

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he raised a toast to the crazy ones. To the misfits, to those who do not fit in, to those who see the world differently. The campaign did not celebrate eccentricity for its own sake; it celebrated the fact, uncomfortable for any conventional manager — that these are the people who change things. Not the ones who follow the process to the letter. The ones who question it.

What strikes me as most provocative in that gesture is not the ode to rebels. It is the implicit courage of a company publicly admitting that it was betting on them. That it would make misfitting a strategy. That it saw, in the mind that does not fit, not a human resources problem but a competitive advantage.

And here I reach the point I still cannot resolve, and so prefer to leave open.

The questions that remain

If intensity is a resource that runs dry, is it worth an organization cultivating intense minds, knowing it will have to protect them from themselves?

How much potential are we leaving on the table when we demand uniform constancy from those born for the precise burst?

Is it possible to build a culture that tolerates brilliant unevenness without becoming hostage to it?

And perhaps the hardest: you who lead, do you prefer a team of predictable execution, or are you willing to live with the discomfort of orchestrating talents who, in exchange for their peaks, will never give you the peace of the average?

I do not have the answer. I have a body that taught me, by force, that intensity without judgment exacts a high price. And a growing suspicion that the organizations that win the coming decade will not be the most constant ones, they will be the ones that learned to save their trumpets for the exact instant when only the trumpet will do.

Perhaps the toast is worth making. But with the glass raised and the eye alert.