While you're spread across a dozen directions, each one gives you an average result. Real income growth starts with focus on a single key competency.
To grow your income, you need to work not more, but less.
I know that statement can sound a bit strange, but it’ll make sense in a moment.
There are 2 kinds of people: those who have already found and developed their key competency, and those who are still searching.
When we’re searching for our strength and trying to pin down our zone of natural talent, sometimes we have to try a lot of different things. Often we end up doing tasks that don’t really excite or inspire us, but that pay the bills here and now. We do this while we still don’t fully understand how to build our work around our favorite, key competency.
The situation is often made worse by the fact that a lot of us are decent at several different things right away. We can talk to clients just fine, work on the product, get the numbers right in a spreadsheet, and run an Instagram account without hating it. As they say, “a talented person is talented at everything.”
The problem with this state is that by spreading your attention, time, and energy across several different directions, you end up with no truly great result in any single one of them. You get an average result in each of those areas individually. You can get by, there’s enough money for everyday expenses, but there’s no path to a new level, no breaking through the income ceiling — and none in sight.
I lived in that model myself for many years and considered myself a “systems entrepreneur.” I ran an online store, ran a marketing agency, offered brokerage-type services, did recruiting for companies, taught, and did another dozen different things. What was the result? I had enough money to live on, but no area had sustainable income growth.
And there was nowhere for that growth to come from, because I was trying to develop several directions at once and not miss any opportunity available to me. Activating each new opportunity immediately pulls commitments, time, and attention into a new area. While you’re working on project #2, project #1 sits still. And what if you have 3 or 4 of them?
So it was only when I closed down all my side directions and focused on a single project — my online school — that real growth and income development began. Of course, I had to give up the idea that I was a “systems entrepreneur,” but in exchange I got a real lever and real points of leverage for scaling.
My main job became creating and distributing educational content. That’s what takes up 80% of my time and attention now. For me, that’s task #1, #2, #3, #4, and #5 in my work. The other 20% goes to training and managing the team.
I stopped doing dozens of things I was decent at and started doing just one thing that gets better and better every day. It turns out that if you correctly find your lever and focus exclusively on it, your growth happens far faster than in any other scenario.
That kind of focus on one thing, of course, means I leave a lot of money “on the table” in the form of unused, easy opportunities that come drifting my way. But that’s exactly the point. You have to learn to leave the small and medium money on the table in order to grab the big money inside your core activity. No entrepreneur has the ability to activate and act on every opportunity available to them. There are always far more of those than there is time, energy, and attention.
The art of it is saying “no” to 99% of incoming things and staying deliberately focused on growing your one thing. A thousand “no”s guard a single “yes.” That’s true for everyone who’s actively growing in their work early on.
Once someone becomes genuinely wealthy, once their one project starts bringing in seven figures, only then do they start playing with diversification and running several different projects. But at that point they can already buy the time of great specialists and managers. They have a large financial cushion and can grow several projects at once without relying on their own personal time and attention. Starting out with that strategy would have been a disaster.
If a beginning entrepreneur looks at an already-successful businessperson and sees they have 4 different projects in different areas, it’s important not to fall for the illusion that all those businesses grew at the same time. They didn’t. The first one grew and became successful enough to fund the fast growth of everything else.
Thinking you need to work on many things at once to get rich is a mistake. It’s like looking at a millionaire and assuming the secret to their wealth is that they drive a Bentley. But they got rich first, and bought the fancy car after. Not the other way around.
So if you start doing just one thing — but doing it exceptionally well — instead of a lot of different things, that can become your path to a new level. People are willing to pay real money for an extraordinary result, not for average results across several niches.
If someone has a heart problem and needs surgery, chances are they want the best cardiac surgeon, someone who’s been doing exactly that operation for the last 28 years — not a general physician who understands the human body in broad strokes.
So learning to do just one thing really well — something inside your zone of talent — is a very fast way to reach a new social level. And in that context, it becomes clear why someone who stops doing 10 different things and starts doing just one, very well, ends up with a disproportionately great result for less effort.