Focus on the right activities leads to business success.

Last week, I addressed the importance of developing a powerful mindset and applying your creativity to the problem solving for which your clients come to you.  But neither of those characteristics will do you any good if you apply them to the wrong activities.  That’s where focus comes in.

When you focus on doing the right things in the right order in the right way, success is inevitable.

The game BrickBreaker is an excellent teacher when it comes to developing  your focus. Just check out these lessons you can learn from it:

•  Keep your eye on the target.  This is a cliché for a reason.  If I’m tracking along and then SQUIRREL!  some distraction catches my eye, I lose a turn.  I have to wonder how often I take my eye off the business ball—a high-impact activity—because some shiny-but-counterproductive task has caught my attention.

•  Also cultivate iguana vision.  You know how iguanas can rotate their eyes independently?  This comes in handy in BrickBreaker as well as in real-life business.  While it’s important to keep your eye on the ball, you don’t want to develop such tunnel vision that you remain oblivious to other opportunities, such as bonus weapons released from destroyed bricks…or new prospects that unexpectedly appear.

• Know what constitutes the next level of “success” for you, so that you’ll know what to focus on to achieve it.  I’ve discovered that trying to beat my high score is not really my goal in BrickBreaker.  What I want to do is get past Level 16 on a consistent basis.  When I finally made it to Level 17, I basked in triumph because—even though my score on that game was lower than the score on a game where I got stalled on Level 16—I had achieved my current goal, which at the time was “make it to Level 17.”

As with many useful recommendations, understanding is easier than implementing.  What are some of your favorite techniques and strategies for developing and maintaining focus?  Have you ever metaphorically shot yourself in the foot by failing to focus?  How did you recover from that?

By the way, since focus is such a challenge, even for successful entrepreneurs, Thursday’s blog will address more lessons on maintaining focus for optimal results.

Thanks to TheMarque for posting the bull’s-eye image in the Creative Commons section of Flickr.

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