In military terms, it has been estimated you will lose nine people on the offense for one person you lose on the defense. In other words, it is nine times more costly to attack than to defend.

While that has its own internal dynamics with respect to strategy and tactics in business, it is also relevant from the standpoint of personal development. In personal development, it takes nine times more energy to seek and destroy bad habits than it does to defend good ones.

When someone asks me whether I want to hear the bad news or the good news, I always want to hear the bad news. Once I hear the bad news, anything I hear after that has got to be better. In addition, it’s the bad news that takes my energy; not the good news.

As an executive manager, my job isn’t to focus on the good news. My job is not to focus on what I do well. If I have one compliment out of every nine communications with respect to what I do well, that’s sufficient. What I’m looking for is how to extinguish the bad news. How do I extinguish those things I do not do well. It takes nine times more energy to do that than it does to preserve a good behavior.

As executive managers, while it’s always understandable that human beings want human intervention and admiration, our job is not to seek out admiration and accolades, it’s to seek out the opportunities to extinguish behaviors which are counter productive or negative.

Original writing date: November 23, 2004

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