I saw Marcus Alexander of Confidence Plus give a talk yesterday at the Surrey Business Club, and he used an interesting formula¹, that gels with my post last week about the importance of Focus. The formula goes:
So if we can reduce interference, performance should go up. Marcus was using interference to mean all the routine stuff around a business, or the stuff that we don’t really want to do. So the trick, he said, is to reduce interference by outsourcing where that makes sense, either for financial or operational reasons.
I think the formula works just as well when talking about the distractions that come from having too many things on the go at once, trying to spread ourselves too thin. By allowing every sparkly new idea, or ‘fantastic’ new opportunity to distract our focus from what we’re really good at, and what we really enjoy doing, we create interference that reduces our performance, or results.
Sometimes it can be hard to stay focussed on a small number of things – that’s one of the reasons I always recommend focusing on things you enjoy (more on that later). And when you think about how much you need to earn in profit each and every day if you’re going to achieve your income targets for the year, then you start to realise quite how much money you’re wasting by not staying focussed. I find that rather focuses the mind!
¹ The formula comes, I think, from Timothy Gallwey’s “The Inner Game of……” books (not that I’ve read them, that’s just from Google)
