Key learning: Where you place your attention shapes your experience more than the outcome itself.

In February I spent a lot of time looking out a window. My mom’s condo overlooks a small lake on the golf course. This month a group of bald eagles started showing up, two adults and three juveniles. I popped the screen out so I could photograph them from four stories up, but most of the time I just watched.

The adults barely moved their wings, struck fish every time they dove in the water, and gracefully glided to the tree to eat their meal. The juveniles are not graceful yet. They land too hard. Miss branches. Chase each other mid-air and collide. Sometimes one dives toward the water, hesitates, pulls up, and pretends that was the plan all along. But occasionally one catches something clean.

What surprised me was what happened after a successful catch. There was no pause or victory lap. The bird circles wide and runs the exact same line again. Same height, same angle, same approach over the water. It simply repeats the path, as if memorizing it. 

This was also the month my mom and I played the Member-Member golf tournament at Pelican Sound. We won our flight the second day and finished second overall in our flight for the two-day event. I also played two additional ladies’ day rounds and came in fourth both times. By any reasonable measure, I played well. However, I didn’t feel that way.

Every bad shot stayed in my head for holes afterward. I replayed the swing, diagnosed it, corrected it mentally before I even reached my cart. When a good shot happened, it registered briefly and then turned into an expectation I needed to maintain.

During a golf lesson, I hit one straight and far enough that I immediately looked at the Pro and she said, “Great shot.” My response was automatic: I needed to know exactly what I did right so I could reproduce it. I did not celebrate. I moved straight into analysis. On the drive home I realized I hadn’t actually felt good about the shot. I only processed it.

I recognized the posture immediately. It was the same one I used in document reviews at work. Every single word gets audited and every ounce of data is analyzed. Everything can be improved and each outcome contains a lesson you are responsible for extracting. All of it turns into actions to achieve the expected outcome. That process worked extremely well for most of my career.

At Amazon, success was expected. If something worked, we analyzed it quickly to understand what to scale and then moved on. When something failed, we slowed down. We wrote Cause of Error documents to identify root causes and senior leaders read every line. Attention went to deviation because that is where the learning lived. And, over time, my attention learned to live there too.

A few days later I was back at the window watching the eagles. I started noticing they didn’t only grab fish. Sometimes it was a stick, a leaf, or nothing at all. The point wasn’t the object; it was the attempt. One of the juveniles dove, grabbed a fish cleanly, climbed, circled and traced the same path again and again. Each time he was getting smoother. It wasn’t reacting to failure. It was studying success. That was when I realized what my attention had been trained to do.

When something works, I don’t celebrate so much as reverse-engineer it to isolate what produced it so I can repeat it. The success becomes the new baseline almost immediately. I learned to scan for error so mistakes would not repeat, but somewhere in the process I stopped letting wins land as anything but another data point.

On the golf course, a good shot became the new baseline immediately. In photography, a strong image became a decision to re-evaluate. Even leaving Amazon, something I had prepared for all year, registered as a transition to manage rather than a moment to feel. I was still operating in correction mode even when nothing was broken.

I am not trying to stop analyzing. That instinct built most of what I am proud of. I am trying to complete the loop. Mistakes show you what to avoid. Success shows you what to repeat.

I am trying to start pausing after good moments before turning them into improvements. Noticing them as experiences instead of immediately converting them into data.

It feels strangely unfamiliar, like I am skipping a step, even though I am actually adding one. The young eagles don’t raise the bar after each clean catch, and they don’t dwell on the misses. They repeat the flight, and each pass looks a little calmer than the last. I am learning to do the same; improve without immediately escalating my expectation.

Natasha