May 6, 2025
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundreds of other good ideas that exist. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”
— Steve Jobs
At the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey, you get rewarded for trying new things and innovating. You made the first jump, you had fun with it, it worked, and now you are in it. But to continue to grow, you have to learn to focus, and whatever your current level of focus is, your next phase will require a different level of focus again.
When I started, I thought it was about the quantity of output I had, until I realized that wasn’t true. If I simply reached out to many people, yes, I would create more opportunities, but without knowing who to reach out to, I had to employ too many resources for the return I got. That’s when I realized I needed to focus.
For me, the focus point became business owners and leaders within organizations. Step 1, done!
Now, it would be easy to assume that when we have clarity on what needs to happen, it will be easy to focus, right?
No. Because the moment I chose to work with businesses, I had to say no to non-businesses, stop writing content for everyone, and make space for writing more specific content. And then, the FOMO kicks in.
You start to argue with yourself about why all the other things, apart from what you said, are a priority, and should now also be a priority. And voilà, focus is gone.
If you’re running a team, you know the power of having everyone focus on one important issue and how much gets done when you do that. And you also know what happens when they’re all running in different directions. Nothing good comes out of that.
Yet, we do it over and over again. Not because we’re stupid, but because we see the opportunity in other things too. We see what would be possible, we see that this too can be important, but we don’t see that when we make everything important, nothing is.
The hardest part about focusing for me was not about knowing what I should do, but not doing all the other things I could also do, even when they all seemed like great ideas. This year alone, I killed 4 projects that, on their own, could have been amazing (the reason I started was because they looked amazing and the possibility was incredible), but they weren’t aligned with what I had realized my focus was.
Many of the great entrepreneurs of our time say the same thing: focus is one of the most important traits to create a great business, and I would add it is one of the most challenging ones. To let everything burn while your team works on the one thing can feel horrible, and you avoiding feeling horrible (feeling horrible is mostly before you make the decision; it tends to get better really quickly after you have the hard conversation) is the reason you haven’t grown.
Focus is simple, but it isn’t easy.
Yet a business owner or leader knows that to evolve, a new level of focus is required.