Herman School of Business
Where is your Focus?
About two months ago I made the decision to start consulting with individuals and companies and therefore I had to come up with a way to “hang out my shingle” to let potential clients know of my availability. This is in addition to setting up speaking engagements, selling books, handling radio interviews and now my latest endeavor…launching an effort to syndicate a weekly column in newspapers across the country based on my business philosophy and nurtured by my writing this daily blog posting.
Whew. Pretty ambitious for a retired person who likes waking up when my sleep is over and not when the buzzer comes on and the radio starts blaring at me.
You can’t do all things well at the same time, so naturally I sat down and put together an order by which these efforts would be organized to maximize the chance for my success. First there was the engagement of BLACK BOOK MARKETING, the two college students up in Wisconsin who are contacting colleges and attempting to book me for speaking engagements. Check that column off, they have it under control.
Radio bookings exceeded my expectation in the first two months. My goal on 1/1 was to do 100 live interviews this entire year. In the first two months I did 29 and several more are already scheduled. I run an ad in a magazine that goes to show producers and get calls from that for future bookings. Also, several radio hosts call me back for return spots because they enjoyed our first interview.
To sell books I added contacting Internet sites of other bloggers, including offering free books in exchange for a mention on their postings. Marketing in one way or another is being done every day.
But lately there has been a huge distraction. Trying to do the mundane everyday tasks has been harder because watching my money shrink in the stock market has been so agonizing it has hurt my focus. For the last two weeks I have had one eye on marketing and one eye on the crash on Wall Street. This weekend with the Bear Sterns collapse my focus was shot. My work was suffering because my mind was trying to figure out what was a lie and what was the truth on MSNBC each time someone spoke. Yesterday I took a breath, stepped back and asked myself what my real goal was…catching a rising star on my stock picks, avoiding the “falling knife” of my my bad picks, or getting back to what really matters, the books, the speeches, the consulting and the syndicated column attempts.
Yesterday I closed my stock trading account. They wired me the entire amount I had plopped there. Today I don’t care about Ben Bernanke, or what The Fed does, or if Citigroup is the next collapse. Today my focus is already sharper. And I have a greater chance for success. Because I identified what the biggest hindrance was to my focusing on what matters and I eliminated it one hundred percent.
What is keeping you from success? Are you willing to cut out the distraction holding you back? Let me thank the United States Air Force Pilot Training program for teaching me that in a crisis in an airplane, periphery things that distract you could kill you. Eliminate them and focus on what matters and you could save your life…allow the distractions to keep you from solving a problem in the cockpit and they might bury you.
What is distracting your focus?
- Posted: 18 March 2008
- Comments: 1
- Category: Running a business
Excellent point, Herman. We think about what our focus is, and don’t always think to discard the things that distract us from it.
Written by Brian on 18 March 2008