Focus on Your Business and Watch it Expand

Every time I find someone proposing 'one opportunity one day and another opp the next', I am reminded of what I learned as a child in first grade. I learned that you can burn a piece of paper with a magnifying glass, once you can get the sun's rays through the glass into a single point on the paper. Do you remember learning that too? What fun it was setting so many paper bits aflame! Well, that's what life is about.

In life (and in business because it is a part of life) focus brings in energy from unexpected quarters. The sun's rays focus at one point on the paper and heat energy is produced. You focus on one business opportunity and wealth energy will be produced. However, there are caveats!

For one, if your paper is soiled, nothing will happen. Similarly, if you are stuck with a losing proposition, you're wasting your energy holding a magnifying glass to it. Usually this is what a job is about. Or a business without long-term vision.

Two, if you can't hold the paper tight, you can be fooling around for hours. Likewise, if your business doesn't have an exte
al system to hold it tight, you're going to be the one burning out! You may visit an article here (Qualities of Leadership Reside in the Word Leader) for more insight or check out an online system here (link below).

And three, if you don't hold the magnifying glass correctly, you won't get the desired result. This is about understanding that you must conduct your business with the right sense of Purpose, Ethics and Loyalty. More about this here.

So, that said, you might still find yourself being lured left and right. That's ok. In his book 'Focus' Al Ries points out that the big corporations have grown big because of focus (citing examples like Xerox, Yahoo, Apple...) but they have dabbled with stuff on the side too.

Here's the crux: Only when they found a side business extension that works along with the marketing of their main products did they present it to the world at large. Like Apple got into iMacs and then iPods. Yahoo presented community links to 'search' for friends (though it's nowhere compared to the focused Facebook), and Xerox got into copier paper... but bombed with computers because they are too strongly a copier company!

So what's good for the billion dollar companies would be good for you. Focus on the one business that isn't soiled. Hold it tight with a system. Conduct it with the right mindset. Research some more if you have time and money. And promote only after you know how each one of your ventures integrate.

Keep 'em burning bud!