Strong Vision to Repel Distractions

Just this past week, an important topic has come up twice: the idea of having an incredibly strong vision to repel distractions. On Thursday, I was talking to an entrepreneur, asking about his favorite piece of advice for new entrepreneurs and initiatives. He mentioned that with a clean slate, energy, ambition, and excitement, it’s easy to get inundated with other people’s ideas, dreams, and pet projects. One of the most important things an entrepreneur can do is to have a really clear, strong vision for how they want the world to look and use that as a lens for all incoming requests. Think about it: with opportunities to do anything and everything, the chance of chasing the shiny object or getting distracted is incredibly high.

Personally, I remember in one of our earliest companies, we were desperate to keep the lights on and had some software sales coming in. A customer made a request for a feature that didn’t fit our vision of the world, but we were so focused on generating revenue that we said yes. We built this feature, very specific to this one customer, and rolled it out. We got a little bit of money from it, but no other customers used it. The customer that had to have it churned, and now we had a bunch of code cruft and technical debt that had piled up over the years, which we had to unwind. The process of unwinding and refactoring was a much greater headache than the cash received from the one customer. Now, the flipside of that is maybe we had to do that work to keep the lights on, and maybe we should’ve had a different approach to how we implemented it. But knowing what I know now, if we were confident that we were going to keep the lights on outside of that customer and without building that new module, I am sure that we would’ve been better off staying the course on our vision and not doing a one-off feature for one customer.

Entrepreneurs, by their very nature, are eager to build, sell, and make progress. So when you add it all together, it creates an environment where distractions, requests, and feedback are plentiful. One of the most important things an entrepreneur can do is have a strong vision to repel distractions.