Focus
Focus is essential when it comes to achieving success. If we try to do too many things and hedge our bets, we spread ourselves too thin. We will never achieve that expertise we need if we are trying to be jack of all trades. I am not suggesting that you can build a business without knowing how to do most of the jobs involved.
Most of us need to do our own marketing, our own book-keeping and our own admin to start with. But we need to become experts at our core offering. We need to live and breathe our product.
“Stick to what you know before you move on to something new – Become the master!”
Alfie Best
“We have created a niche, and we became professionals at what we do because we focused hard and fast on one industry.”
Alfie Best
Push
Sometimes we all hold back, we all have that feeling of uncertainty, the wrench in our gut. Here is when we need to push ourselves, push on through … or have somebody to push for you. In Richard St John’s talk he says that is why we have mums!
It doesn’t have to be your mum but if you can find someone who can push you when you are struggling to push yourself then great. The truth is though that I suspect few innovators have somebody who will push them in this way. Most of us are likely to have many more people surrounding us who think that we should give up.
These are not horrible people. These are people who believe that what they are doing is in your best interest. They cannot see your vision … they just see you struggling to achieve something that they do not understand and possibly believe is not possible … like going to space despite not being an astronaut!
Steal magnate Andrew Carnegie says, “You cannot push any one up a ladder unless he be willing to climb a little himself.”
“Whatever I engage in, I must push inordinately.”
Andrew Carnegie
Serve
“You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”
Zig Ziglar
St John identified serving people as one of the secrets of success. Certainly, if you find a way to help someone with a problem then you are headed on a good path. It is commonly held that your product or service must address an issue that people are having.
This is of course not the only way to create something that people will buy. If anyone out there is old enough to remember pet rocks (they were literally smooth stones from a Mexican beach with googly eyes and a painted mouth), then you would have to agree that they didn’t solve any problems. This did not stop them being the collectable of 1975.
What it did do was raise a smile. People need amusement in their lives so there is a huge industry in entertainment, from this point of view I guess even pet rocks served a need. A need to be amused. Most idea’s need to be more than vaguely amusing though.
Most ideas need to serve people, whether it is a faster solution or an eco-friendly option it needs to benefit some section of humanity. This only makes good sense, but most successful people would go beyond this. Most head up charities or trusts and are involved in altruistic projects.
“If you’re in the luckiest 1% of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99%.”
Warren Buffet
Ideas
One thing that none of the super-rich are short of is ideas. Look at how many businesses Richard Branson has run. Look at how many technical innovations Lord Sugar has been behind. Not all of these ventures have been successful, but this does not stop these people, they just keep going. If nobody had ideas, then we would still be living in caves. If people had ideas but were too nervous to try them, again, welcome to my cave. It is the dream, the idea which starts in the mind that becomes the innovation. There is a quote, perhaps by Henry Ford which says:
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
