The “X factor” as a talent-related concept is mostly total bunk. But the one small part of it that isn’t is the tiny sliver where your grit, passion & perseverance outlast whatever, whomever you or your work is being compared to in that moment, project, battle.

If you live your life, excel in your career, outperform all expectations that those without an “X factor” are expected to achieve… All with a little voice in the back of your head forcing you to face the fact you haven’t reached your limit… Then, my dear, highly capable friend, my tortured ambitious soul, my over-achieving career twin… That is the rare sign few ever receive, comprehend and certainly never take action on.

You will be different.

We are all called to do more in our lives, to push ourselves every inch of the painful, terrifying way until we bump up squarely against the razor sharp edge of our potential – whether that be as a spouse, a parent, an employee, a friend or a business leader.

The voices are growing louder these days, they speak up more often, and the razor sharp edge seems to be harder and harder to find.

Sometimes it fades into the darkness of a room filled with 75 executives, sometimes it fades as an idea you are passionate about gets pummeled over and over again because the timing still isn’t quite right… And sometimes it just freaking fades. Full stop. No explanation.

That’s life.

But what is always consistently true is that the lamest possible thing one can do is complain when the voices have good reason to grow louder. Instead, it’s my job – the only one that truly matters – to take action.

Sometimes that means flipping over the table where my professional place card sits today.

Other times that means accepting an invitation to a different table, with different voices and different challenges worthy of applying that same religious conviction, worthy of pouring your body of work into solving for a time with reckless, passionate abandon.

And sometimes, the most difficult move is the one that requires you sit still and do nothing in that moment. Patience is the X factor in that case that a rare few exercise when it counts. And often that is the hardest lesson of professional maturity one can learn – how to sit.

I do all three imperfectly, every time. But I’m so very grateful I still hear the voices, that they’re getting louder, and that I still feel called to invest in something greater, in people more important than anything I could ever attempt or accomplish on my own.

I have a soft spot for those crazy voices, and the potential hope they whisper into each of our psyches about what calling we’ve yet to fulfill.

Always embrace the voices, the crazy, the calling… The X no one can ever define or duplicate… The magical grit & lightning in a bottle we were given to define our legacy.

All my love and professional crazy,

SKE

Today, I still feel extremely far from being the leader I ultimately hope to become. Yet, the one thing I know to be true above all else is that the failures & learning I’ve experienced as a result are what have made me who I am today. And those yet to come will only serve to refine me into the future leader I deeply aspire to be.

I was lucky enough for the LinkedIn/Slideshare team to pick-up my deck & feature it on a recent post about leadership – and in just a few weeks, it now has over 50,000 views.

If I had any hesitation about sharing with the world my most glorious failures, there’s certainly no hiding them now… so thought I might as well share with you too. So, enjoy.

Yet, at some point, when the rest of it all becomes too hectic, to tense or too all-consuming, we tend to forget to do the things that make us who we are every day… the things restore our sanity in life and that keep our passion alive for things we grew to love at an early age.

For me, that is writing… and that is the one thing I’ve let go of foolishly over the last year and must now discipline myself to recover. Its absence not only leaves me without one of my passions, it also changes who I am otherwise and often not in the best of ways.

Whether in short blogs like this one, or in multi-part editorials I have forever relished writing for real publications, it’s time to make the time once again.

Here’s to the first step in doing so.

-SKE

This post is one I would usually take three days to meticulously draft, edit, refine, shape, edit some more… until I had whittled it down to grammatical perfection as the undergrad journalism major in me obsessively requires.

And yet, that is entirely why I won’t.

3 DAYS IS SOMETIMES 2.9 DAYS TOO MANY
Spending 3X the time or resource to improve the quality of an outcome by 20% or less seems like a waste. That’s because it is.

Yet, it also requires chutzpah to knowingly publish, ship or launch less-than-perfect work in the interest of the greater good, i.e. what else those 2.9 days could be spent building, testing and learning about instead.

That’s our job at Sabre Labs.

To learn as much as we possibly can out of that .1 day and move on to the next over and over again, so that we ultimately can learn from the 29 others that await our trainwreck of  efficient failure.

OVERCOMING EGOS + PUBLISHING NOT-SO-PERFECT WORK
Sabre Labs struggles with this as a team already, mainly because we are used to the expectation of excellence our core businesses rightfully demand in all they do for our customers.

We have a front-row seat at the ‘how to scale’ show. And 99.9998% uptime is no joke.

But our charter is very different, one measured by the speed, quantity and quality of what we can learn from screwing up and teach others how not to do the same.

That requires a commitment to shedding our egos for the sake of realizing exponentially greater progress & learning from the outcome that anything other than perfection offers.

And so, you’re getting the real first draft. No edits. No backspaces. No spell check.

A missing character here & an extra space there should be a reminder as to why our team in Sabre Labs exists at the beloved travel technology company we call home, Sabre Holdings.

And as the Director of Sabre Labs, there is no doubt I have the coolest job in all of travel.  But being quite the perfectionist, it’s a daily struggle. The rest of Labs is also made up of a few closet perfectionists who are just as diseased as I am.

And yet, our job is to pursue anything but perfection.

WE BREAK STUFF FOR A LIVING. 
More importantly than it is to build things, our job is to break things. Fast. To make stuff. To screw up big time. And to get right back up and knock it out of the park immediately after.

We push ourselves and our global company of 11,000+ employees to be comfortable with failure through rapid prototyping & aggressive pursuit of what our optimal future as a company holds, because therein most assuredly lies the magic. Therein lie the small misteps as well as the trainwreck disasters from which our company most quickly & most effectively will learn.

See – missteps is supposed to have two s’s.

It’s killing me to refrain from correcting my mistake.

80/20 IS NOT JUST GOOD ENOUGH, IT’S IDEAL.
But instead, I’m trading discomfort in exchange for the glorious trainwreck of 80/20 work that will result.

Sometimes the outcomes of Sabre Labs experiments will be abysmal failures, others will hit the travel tech jackpot… but all will overflow with rich insight that it is our team’s job to not just share, but overshare.

We are showing how low-risk, low-cost experiments bring value to a big company. And through those we teach what not to do tomorrow. How that thing we thought was going to be so awesome, in fact turned into a swift kick in the shorts. And every once in awhile, we remind eachother what it looks like to outpunt the heck out of our coverage.

Ultimately, our team is committed to supporting the core businesses of Sabre Holdings in continuing to be awesome at what they do, while leaving one heck of a legacy to behold in its wake.

The decisions & investments our work will help inform today will impact how travelers connect tomorrow, and that demands nothing less than glorious, glorious trainwrecks to learn from and share with you each day.

SABRE LABS IS BACK.

-SKE

All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, “You must do this. I can’t.” ~C.S. Lewis

Instead, most of us will invest 4 decades of our careers to accomplishments based on PowerPoint presentations, business requirements, meetings, selling stuff, maybe even a working application… but deep down, we know all are more than forgettable once we retire, and likely even sooner.

I’ve yet to hear of anyone leaving a legacy based on their PowerPoint talent.

Harsh? Maybe. Honest? Absolutely.
Many of us accept this truth – or simply push it down into the depths of our conscious to avoid dealing with a reality that will inhibit our ability to get through each workday.

I know this because there was a time in my career I also felt this way.

I was recently reminded of those experiences when I stumbled upon this quote that relates to finding true joy in life by being used for a purpose you believe in:

“This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap… being a force of nature.” -G.B. Shaw

Pondering this over the break, I was challenged to reevaluate whether I had chosen tasks worthy of investing the majority of my time professionally this past year versus dedicating myself & my career to a higher-level purpose.

While I finally have a job I enjoy more than any other in my career to-date, I know the happiness my job provides is based on the gratification I get out of investing in the individual job, not investing in a greater driving purpose that transcends just one job and defines an entire career – a life’s work, in a sense.

For many women, the mightiest purpose of all is in serving one’s family… and what I don’t have to tell you is that today, at least for now, I am still wired quite differently than most females I know & respect.

I’ve yet to shake my unwavering passion to serve a meaningful purpose in my career equally to the purpose I will serve at home, leaving me with a desire to dedicate myself to a mighty purpose in both.

And, maybe naively, I truly do believe it’s possible.

The lie we accepted too soon about our careers
Yet, many of us gave up too soon on having both, and we believe our future is set to not include a professional legacy worth remembering, worth talking about once we’re long gone.

We believe our contributions will never be worthy of the history books, and we’ve accepted it.

To those of you in that boat, don’t you dare settle for that as truth just yet.

That nagging question.
Even I obsessively ask myself, 50 years from now, what will the technical fruits be from my decades at work? What will the lasting impact be of my work today once I’m long gone?

The truth? It will likely be a collection of laughable tech relics that are no more valuable once I’m dead & gone than a carton of milk bought today would be.

That’s predictable in technology. And we also know there will only be one Steve Jobs per lifetime, leaving very few things we build to be relevant beyond our death.

With that in mind, how is the utlimate output or purpose of my career any different from a teenager flipping burgers, or even a stripper? The impact and benefit of a job well done is equally temporary in all three, lasting little more than minutes beyond the accomplishment.

That’s depressing, right?

So, I began to think about what it would mean to do so much more: What greater purpose am I capable of committing myself to? What lasting impact will differentiate my career from others?

Finding a purpose you recognize as mighty.
My answer is one I’m still refining… but overall is worthy of dedicating a career to: PEOPLE

Not what I build or develop, but what I invest in those I’m lucky enough to be given the privilege to lead & manage each day is the mightiest purpose I can imagine.

This seems so obvious, right? But way too many claim to do this, and way too few actually do it.

Those who do it will be rare – and it’s a commitment I believe to be quite worthy of my time.

My potential impact on future generations rests squarely in what I invest in these people, the example I set that they too believe worthy of passing on to those they will also one day lead.

It will be in the dollars & minutes spent developing their skills, knowledge freely shared, listening actively engaged in, risks taken to create opportunities for their brilliance to shine, the I-sincerely-give-a-shit commitment to push them to be nothing less than they very best they are capable.

Not saying I’ll be good at it, just that it’s worthy of the attempt.
I believe this is a purpose I’ve recognized as mighty enough to dedicate a career to, even though I can’t say I will actually be good at fulfilling it.

On the contrary, it will be difficult for me to invest the time away from my habitual obsession delivering individual outputs that offer instant gratification.

My career to-date has been built on being incredibly good at exactly that… to invest fully instead in this purpose will require some discomfort on my part to be sure.

This is going to hurt.
I’m committing to doing what isn’t natural, but what I know is best for my company beyond anything else I could invest in… and absolutely is best for those I lead, and also those they will one day lead.

And the end of the day, this is the type of career-driving purpose that won’t provide gratification or visible fruits of labor until possibly the day when I’m not around to see it.

But at the end of a long, exhausting, yet fulfilling career, this is also the very type of rare purpose worthy of tirelessly wearing myself out for… worthy of investing decades of work in to refine… worthy giving myself a chance to hopefully reflect back one day far from now from the scrap heap of my career with what I hope is a tired, but proudly satisfied smile.

~SKE

Christensen believes the root cause for the inability to innovate is not framing the problem correctly.

Companies do not understand what is happening with these new technologies…

More specifically, they don’t understand how the adoption of these technologies is changing their customers.

Companies fail to see the weight of the impact of technology on our habits, our behaviors and our eventual long-term needs & motivators for tomorrow that didn’t exist in our decision-making processes yesterday.

 Expensive failure always results when disruption is framed as simply technological rather than business model terms… or in terms that stress the disruption as a “job” customers are hiring your product to do.

There’s a tendency to view market competition through a technology-only lens, which leads to every big company examining simply the new technology, not the assumptions behind its existence. They simply take note of its face-value inferiority to what current leaders offer.

And it then becomes all too easy to immediately dismiss it.

That’s the mistake.

Companies should think in terms of customer context… customer impact… the job being done for the customer by the disruption arriving on its industry’s doorstep.

Otherwise it’s like a group of idiots being so intently focused on critiquing another company’s theoretical shade of nail polish, let’s say for the sake of a terrible example, that they completely miss the fact that hand, with the ugly nail polish, is actually flipping them the F-U bird… while the other hand warms for a sucker-punch to the face ending in lights out, Pacquioa-style ‘ya don’t have to go home, but ‘cha can’t stay here…’ defeat.

With the cold mat of a blue boxing ring pressed up to any company’s face… and blood filling their mouths… its a lot more difficult to go out fighting like the champ they once were & deserve a shot at continuing to be.

Lesson being: Don’t focus on the inferior technology… but instead the assumptions & job being done for the customer that is behind its existence.