Today I want to talk about the one thing that you need to do to push through any obstacle with your business.
Now I’m not going to tell you what the one thing is that you need to do but I’m going to say that there is One thing that when all else fails…needs to be your core strength, your fallback position; the thing that’s going to get you through whatever adversity that you face.
What made me think about this was a movie a watched recently called Ender’s Game. It’s a very character-driven sci-fi movie about a boy who basically has to command the world’s military to protect against an alien invasion.
The whole time (I’m not going to give away the movie) the boy is trained to win at all costs, and plays these war simulations where there are all kind of different points awarded for successful “kills” of enemy soldiers – but all of those points go out the window IF YOU WIN the game by doing one particular thing.
Here’s a scene from the movie that depicts one of these simulations
I’m not going to say how it goes, how the movie ends…but he basically has to focus on one thing to win. It’s like a big game simulation that’s just about winning and not about what you lose along the way.
And that’s what I take away from it is that sometimes winning in life isn’t “clean”.
Sometimes you win by not losing as much as the other person and sometimes that’s what happens in business: you may have to sacrifice something.
Maybe you are doing too many things.
Maybe you need to…not abandon some things but maybe pull back and refocus on where your success came from originally. What put your business on the map? Why did people want to come to your business?
Sometimes you need to focus on one thing to succeed.
So that’s something that I took away from the movie and I recommend it. There are some different moral aspects of the movie that I definitely won’t get into…but I definitely took something away from it that was positive:
At any given point in time you can have all kinds of distractions swirling around you that are demanding your attention, and they may SEEM like emergencies.
But if you can focus in on that one thing that’s going to make the sales, bring in the money to your business – you know you may suffer some losses, maybe have an Adwords campaign, perhaps even several of them that just aren’t working for you and are costing you money…
But if you can get that one campaign to fire on all cylinders… that one campaign will often offset all your losses somewhere else.
So focus on that one thing that’s going to push you through the adversity and help you bring in the sales, bring in the money in…bring whatever you need to keep your business going.
You always want to diversify – don’t get me wrong; you don’t want to be a one-trick pony and then have the rug pulled out from under you if something should happen to your one method.
But at the same time, we often try to do too much and split our focus across many different channels and maybe we don’t do it as well as we should. When we have one way where we can really excel, we can really put everything into it and make a really big impact.