Andy Grove was the CEO of Intel during its meteoric rise to the top of the semiconductor industry. Whatever device you’re reading this on, there’s a good chance there’s an Intel chip inside, and Andy Grove’s leadership is a big reason why.

Grove was an extremely competent, hard-working, and impressive person. In 1956, at age 20, he fled communist rule in his native Hungary, arriving penniless in the States. A few years later, he’d earned a PhD in Chemical Engineering from UC Berkeley. He was the third employee at Intel and eventually became the CEO, where his methodical, detail-oriented approach to management brought the company success upon success and earned him the admiration of his employees and his peers. Grove passed away in 2016, an icon of 20th century business. If there’s such a thing as a born leader, surely Andy Grove was one.

The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.

— Stanley Milgram

In our quest to understand the world and navigate it successfully, we need to make use of the best ideas from different disciplines. Here’s a simple but useful concept from social psychology that will improve your understanding of human behavior (if you can keep it in mind).

Success is about learning how the world works and aligning our actions accordingly. This is true in every area of life.

In our careers, success is about figuring out which skills are most valued in our profession and developing those skills to the best of our ability. In our relationships, success is about figuring out others’ needs and how to meet them.

We all have strengths and weaknesses that help and hinder our efforts to align our actions with pre-existing laws. The problem is, it’s difficult to notice our own tendencies—how we generally react to different situations. Being a good student of one’s own behavior is really, really hard.

Do you have a lot to do? Me too.

Except we don’t. We only ever have one thing to do: the task at hand.

I realize that sounds like a cop-out. Just like you, I know that creeping feeling of panic and despair as a thousand obligations clamor for our attention. Heck, I’ve had that feeling this week.

So maybe the task at hand is to take our thousand obligations and make a plan for how we’re going to get them done. But the task at hand isn’t to do a thousand things, because we can’t do a thousand things—we can only do one thing.

A reader wrote me the other day and asked if the pandemic had caused me to rethink my fairly hardline position on social media. This is a great question.

Social media isn’t inherently good or bad. As Cal Newport pointed out in Deep Work, it’s just a collection of tools that connect people to one another.

Social media does a whole bunch of other things, too—it eats our free time, divides us into tribes, and encourages us to compare ourselves to others. And while social media does connect us, the low-quality digital connection it offers is a poor substitute for rich, face-to-face interaction.