As long as you're playing ten roles at once, you'll never go deep in any of them. Real results start when you find your growth lever and focus on it.
In my last two posts I wrote about how to bring more value to the market and why it matters to work deeply on yourself. If you happen not to have read them, skim them so you have the context.
Today let’s talk about focus.
When a person starts growing and doing work they love, at first they have a huge number of different functions and responsibilities. They combine the roles of salesperson, administrator, marketer, content maker, finance manager, production manager (even if they sell a service rather than a product), security specialist, and many others.
At the very beginning of the road that’s logical, because you don’t have the resources to bring in other people for those functions.
But juggling those roles for a long stretch of time is a below-average pleasure. Each of those functions takes up a certain share of your attention, and as you switch between them, you never go deep enough into any one role long enough to get truly good results in it.
A person in that situation will quickly feel a financial glass ceiling over their head.
The moment comes when a person asks themselves: “What is the specific growth lever for what I do?”
Sooner or later, that lever is found.
And if the person then focuses first 60% of their attention, and later 80% of it, on that area, it will start producing extraordinary results.
A lot of people stay small in terms of income because they try to do everything themselves and don’t want to pay others for work they could do on their own.
From my point of view, genuinely good results begin when a person focuses on one specific thing, and either delegates all the other directions to others or handles them on a leftover basis.
For me, that lever turned out to be creating educational content.
Within our school New Lifestyle I do it as a speaker and I run courses.
With my personal audience on social media, I create a lot of content as a talking head (all the rest of the important work is done by our team).
That’s my lever. Working it hard every single day for 20 months, we managed to build an audience of 300,000 followers across different social networks. The attention of that many people lets us sell a lot of our educational products, which gives us the resources we need to grow.
If (alongside the role of speaker and teacher) I had immediately tried to become an excellent videographer, editor, sound engineer, SMM manager, finance manager, designer and salesperson — I think we’d be growing 100 times slower.
It was exactly the focus on one thing that led to the current level of results. I try to give people something useful every time I write about something or speak publicly.
It seemed to me that if I could create a queue of clients on social media, then all the other processes would be easier to set up with the right team. And that’s how it’s working out for us.
That doesn’t mean you need to drop everything and focus on a blog. It works for me because I love it and because I’m a teacher by nature. I understood my gifts and talents relatively early. I even built a course on this topic.
For some of you, the lever will be focusing on production, for others on sales, and some of you need to get into finance. At different stages of our work, the growth areas differ a great deal.
But it’s very important that you develop your strength every day and focus on it. The market pays good money for good results, not for mediocre ones. So betting on your gifts and talents seems to me a better idea than trying to become a pro at something you don’t enjoy.
Do you agree with the idea that focusing on one thing can lead to good results?
It is rarely a lack of knowledge
Income runs into thinking and habits, not information. In a session we work out what is actually holding you back and what to do about it in the coming weeks.
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