When you’re a high-level advisor doing significant work, what’s the most important thing to focus on? Most people say the client. That seems obvious. It would be crazy not to put the client first, right?

But what if that’s wrong? What if the key to great work isn’t focusing on the client, or on yourself and how you’ll be perceived, but on the thing that needs to be created?

Ted Kooser, who was Poet Laureate of the United States, wrote about this approach to doing good work. He said that if poets focus on the romance of being a poet, they take their eye off the ball. If they focus on their own identity and gains, their work will suffer. Instead, he said, a poet must “serve each poem we write. We make ourselves subservient to our poetry.”

The work is the master. Our job is to serve it.

An approach like this requires that we set aside our ego. (Why?)

Because when you’re focused on ego – on acceptance, fame, or self-aggrandizement – your attention is split. You’re trying to solve the problem and manage how you’re perceived, which creates interference. Worse, it makes you conservative. You play it safe to avoid looking foolish, protecting yourself instead of serving the work.

When you shelve all that, you become free to see what the work actually requires, not what will make you look good. As the therapist Dr. David Reynolds told me, “You can’t work well while hoping that others praise your work, or that your work will make you rich. Progress comes when you shelve your emotions and demands for a while.”

I’ve had to use this principle when the stakes felt impossibly high. When advising people like the head of a division who served in two former White House administrations, or the former president of UPS, you realize the work can affect millions of people and countless amounts of money. The natural reaction is, “Gulp! What do I do?”

But I never think like that. Why? Because I’m focusing on the outcome as something beautiful and separate from me and my client – like an object floating in Plato’s theory of forms. I’m just trying to make that thing as bewitching as possible. That focus dissolves the pressure.

When you focus on the work itself, ego and personality fall away. You don’t worry about who gets the credit or whether you look smart. You are both simply servants to the highest version of what needs to be created.