Everyone tells you to focus on a single set of actions or even just one project when you're becoming an entrepreneur.
Even Neil Patel from Quicksprout said in the interview for my eBook called The Entrepreneurial Lifestyle, that you need to have LASER focus to become successful.
But I had massive problems to focus on just one thing as I was starting out building my Internet business. There were simply too many things to do.
As you might now, I have been working as software consultant and web designer before I decided to switch my business model.
I was in a position where I didn't know anything about Internet business, so the first thing I did was to become a member of a powerful mastermind group and learning academy called Internet Business Mastery Academy.
There were two reasons to join especially this community:
It wasn't until then that I understood the enormous variety of options I had and more importantly, how much I had to learn.
How do you focus on single projects, when you feel like you know nothing but you want to know everything?
Knowing nothing isn't a bad thing at all. In fact, it's probably one of the best things that can happen to you, because you then have the free choice of what to do.
There are no prejudices or opinions holding you back, you just have lots of ways to choose from.
For me, those ways where open:
I decided that I'd break the rule from Neil Patel, even though he's damn successful, because I wouldn't have felt right for me.
Instead of just focusing on one of the options listed above, I pursued two of them - and maybe subconsciously maybe more.
Rather than just learning enough to have a comfortable start, I decided to start a blog about my learning progress.
This resulted in MyGreatOnlineBusiness.com being started and public pressure on my shoulders to get me going.
I knew that I would keep going on, once I have the first visitors on my site, because I would do everything to not disappoint them.
Starting that blog was a surefire way to make progress in learning and in the real world - and that's what it's all about.
MyGreaOnlineBusiness killed two birds with one stone. It forced me to keep learning and it was a platform where I could apply what I learned to verify that I understood everything.
Besides learning and blogging about what I learned, I decided that having a high quality network of like-minded people is mandatory.
That's why I heavily engaged (and still do) with my mastermind group from Internet Business Mastery.
You can see, that I focused on three things at a time, instead of laser focusing on one single aspect!
I truly believe that this was the key to success for me, because my business really did grow rapidly.
Would I have focused on one single step and started another when that first step was ready, this growth would haven't been possible.
Focus is limiting your possibilities!
It's true, because you're only concentrating on one goal and one single route to achieve that goal.
Let's do a test.
Please count, how many times the players in white pass the ball to each other.
Did you pass the test?
The first time I saw this, I didn't pass the test. This video is a strong proof for the limitations of focusing on a single project or task!
Luckily, there is a way to leverage the strong benefits of having the focus on the right things
Focus on overall goals!
Stop focusing on ways to reach your goals, but focus only on the goals themselves.
Reading The Effortless Life by Leo Babauta, the host of zenhabits.net, I finally understood the trick.
Once we stop focusing on HOW we want to achieve our goals but instead focus on WHAT we want to achieve, we're having much more possibilities to reach our goals!
It's like life opens up new roads we just didn't see before, because we're living more consciously.
Since I started to focus only on my goal of earning $1,000 of monthly passive income, I feel like my business exploded (in a good way 🙂 ).
Instead of just trying to focus on a few specific actions, I was open to new possibilities that improved my business.
That's why I introduced Amazon Associates to one of my new niche sites and stopped relying on Google Adsense only.
That's why I started coding a webapp to estimate my niche sites income.
And that's why I was open enough to get in touch with a wonderful girl from New Zealand who wants help with her blog, even though I don't offer that service publicly!
And that was only one week. To be honest, I can't wait what life comes up with next 😉
Try this experiment:
Pick one goal and only focus on taking action to reach that goal - regardless how!
Stop thinking of only a few ways to reach that goal, there are way more (and probably easier) options to choose.
Focusing on HOW to reach a goal doesn't make sense, because we just can't plan our future.
We can't even predict how a soccer game ends, how should we plan a whole week or even several years?
It's just important that you focus on WHAT you want to achieve, not on HOW.
Once you learn to be open to the world, you'll start seeing new opportunities almost everywhere.
Implementing methods like Getting Things Done or Zen To Done will help you to keep track of all these new ideas.
I can't wait to hear your thoughts on this post! If you've read it this far, please take another minute and leave a comment below!
All the best,
Jan
