Focus, Focus, Focus – An Entrepreneur’s Challenge

Entrepreneurs see abundance in the world. An opportunity here, an opportunity there. This serves the entrepreneur well in the early days. Identify a need. Rapidly iterate. Earn product/market fit.

Only, at some point, instead of chasing the next shiny object, it’s time to focus. Instead of a default ‘yes’ it needs to be a default ‘no.’ This is hard for most entrepreneurs.

Famously, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple after many years away, he killed off most of the product lines and reorganized the company around a limited number of initiatives. Focus.

Focus becomes even harder when your startup is ‘hot.’ Everyone wants your time. Investors constantly ask for meetings. Media constantly asks for interviews. Organizations constantly ask for appearances. Ultimately, these are more distractions that make focusing difficult.

Take a few minutes every Sunday night and look at last week’s schedule and the upcoming week’s schedule.

What meetings were worthwhile?

What meetings weren’t worthwhile?

What are you excited about on the schedule?

What aren’t you excited about on the schedule?

Regularly take time to evaluate where effort is spent. Then, ruthlessly cut out the distractions.

Focus. Focus. Focus.

2 thoughts on “Focus, Focus, Focus – An Entrepreneur’s Challenge

  1. There’s an old but good book on the importance of focusing. It is titled (you guessed it) “Focus” by Al Reis. I think it is available on Amazon.

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