Why Focus is So Hard and So Important for Growth

When I first met my wife, she was a nurse. She went to school at Villanova for nursing and had been in the field for four years at that point. But that was long enough for her to realize it wasn’t for her. She loved working with patients but really disliked all the admin, paperwork, and constant threat of liability the hospital would daily admonish the staff about watching out for rather than trying to just think about what was best for the person they were treating.

Not knowing what she wanted to do she took a temp job as a front desk receptionist but was quickly offered a position in the company’s accounting department. Within six months she’d been promoted again after they saw what a great job she did, and they were offering to pay for her to take accounting classes and had plans for her to replace the controller who was due to retire in less than a year.

But accounting was not something she really liked either and she quit that job so we could travel for a few months before we had kids. When we came back, she took another temp job and this time she was leveled up in the marketing department.

She went from not knowing anything about paid search ads (or any marketing at all) to managing the entire company’s paid search efforts – and this was a company whose whole business was offering paid search to their clients. She managed over sixteen million dollars in ad spend at the time she left to stay home as a full-time mom. She didn’t really love marketing either, but she was good at it.

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Now I think she has finally discovered her true passion- horses. She is working on becoming a therapeutic horse instructor for kids and volunteers at a horse rescue- I’ve never seen her more engaged and happier than she is doing that. She liked her other jobs, but she loves this.

I will admit she would be highly embarrassed if she knew I was writing about her and mad at me for sharing this because she is not someone who likes any spotlight or recognition. Luckily, she doesn’t read anything I write so she’ll never know. 

But I am not writing this to brag about her, although it probably sounds like that. Rather, I am making a point- people who are quick learners, hard workers, and who care about doing a good job can be successful at a lot of different things. Like entrepreneurs. 

It’s basically in our DNA to spot opportunities and jump in. And if we work hard, learn from our mistakes, and care about making things a success, it will happen. But here’s the problem- once we’ve started on one thing, it’s very hard for us to turn off the “opportunity spotter” that got us there in the first place! 

The temptation is to jump into more and more businesses as each new can’t miss killer idea pops up. But every time you come to a fork in the road and try to take both at the same time, it means each thing you do is getting less than your full attention and effort. Which is a recipe for failure. Just because you can launch a lot of different businesses doesn’t mean you should.

Here’s the good news, though- you aren’t hurting your chances of success by sticking with just one thing, even though it can feel like it.

How to Stay Focused as an Entrepreneur and Benefit from Certain Success

I know it can feel like we’re blowing it when we don’t pursue our latest business brainstorm. I’ve suffered from this myself, many, many times! But I will also say this- for the first twelve years I was a business owner, I was nowhere near as successful as I have been in the second twelve years. The difference? In the first twelve, I worked on/started/owned over a dozen businesses. For the second twelve- I’ve done only one.

And that was because I intentionally forced myself to not launch anything else. I will write down my new idea in my “businesses to start later” journal and I give myself permission to think about it for a few hours. But then I close the notebook and go back to my current business.

I am sure I could have made some of those ideas into successes. Maybe even big successes. But they also would have had their own headaches and problems. The grass is never greener, just different.

I also know this- if all you do is one thing, and each day, week, month, and year you spend time doing it just a little better, and you do that for 20 years, it’s impossible for you not to be extremely successful. Literally impossible. No matter what business it is you started out with. Because if you do that, and really make it better, solve problems, delight customers, and innovate in your area of expertise you cannot help but become a top business in the category and be bigger and better than virtually all of your competition.

I know some days it will seem boring and old and annoying and not nearly as interesting as your newest new idea. But I promise that new idea has warts too- you just don’t see them yet. They may even be a whole lot worse than the ones on the business you have now, which at least you know exactly where they are and how to deal with!

Of course, just “being open” for twenty years won’t do it. But if you stick with one thing and keep making it a little better all the time you will not fail to reach huge success. It doesn’t matter what type of business it is, if you put in the kind of focused effort, you will outperform everyone else who is either newer than you or less dedicated to making the business amazing.

Therefore, there is no point in switching or launching new businesses because you will have to do that for each of them. You aren’t shortening the time period for major success, but you are hurting your chances of getting there at all by starting more and more because it takes a full-time effort to get just one to the top, whichever one you decide to do.

In other words, like my wife, you can be good at a lot of businesses, but if you want to reach the top 1% and be really, really successful you need to ride one winner for the long haul and leave aside the rest. Focus. That’s it. Focus and continuous improvement. Those are the “secrets” to success.

Commit to not jumping into another business (as much as they look new and shiny and better!) and focus on the one you have and on making it better every day. There is no better way to achieve the highest levels of success in business than by focusing on the one you can take the farthest and then doing it!