Focus + creativity + powerful mindset = success.

I spoke in Monday’s blog about how playing the seemingly trivial game of BrickBreaker taught me some key business lessons about focus.  Since focus is key to success in business or in BrickBreaker, here are some more lessons learned.

Focus forward, focus tight, focus smart.

• Keep your attention focused forward on your next steps, rather than backward on what’s already happened.  I may be curious about how many points I’ve racked up by bashing the ball into some bricks, but is keeping track at that particular moment worth losing a turn?  Not really.  Similarly, it feels great to wallow in recent successes, but will that ensure that you continue to enjoy more success in the future?  It’s important to look yourself in the mirror and ask, “So what have you done for me lately?”

• Avoid the temptation to multi-task.  Sometimes in BrickBreaker you’ll hit a brick which releases a capsule containing multiple balls.  Instead of there being a single ball for me to keep my eye on, all of a sudden there are four balls flying around, each of which is tempting me to pay attention to it.  Ninety percent of the time I find that, if I try to handle several balls at once, I end up not handling any of them at all, losing a turn, and stopping the progress of the game dead in its tracks.  It’s a good reminder to focus on one task, one activity that will produce the greatest business results for me, and only then switch to another task.

• Choose your actions wisely.  While taking a short break from work can be productive, playing BrickBreaker instead of working would obviously have a very bad effect on my business success.  That’s why it’s important for all successful entrepreneurs to be ruthless about how they choose to spend their precious, limited time. (If you want to learn more about why you need to pay attention to activity management rather than fool around learning time management skills, see my earlier blogs.)

So there you have it: the last of two weeks’ worth of business lessons I learned from playing BrickBreaker.  What do you think of all this?  Have you learned these lessons through some other powerful teacher?  What’s been the result of applying them in your business?

By the way, thank you to Tools for providing the dictionary image in the Creative Commons section of Flickr.

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