Biggest Mistake I Made in Business
Let me share with you the biggest mistake I made in business and what I learned from it.
My first few years in business, I had a mindset of diversification. I thought if I worked on many things I can grow them all. I did consulting work. I worked on multiple products. I thought I was taking less risk by doing many different things. What I was doing was wasting my time and energy on services and products that had no potential for growth.
It took me years to see my mistake. But, once I gave my complete attention to a product that has the most potential, it started growing rapidly. I still regret those first years when I didn’t give my 100% attention to JotForm. I wasted valuable time.
The most important thing in business is giving your complete attention to things that matter. It is easy to lose sight of them. For me, the most important thing is growth. I love having a product that is used by over a million people.
Stop doing too many things. Find out what grows and give your complete, irrational, and single-minded attention to it.
Our minds cannot think in multiplications. We think everything has the same importance. Even when we know everything is not equal our minds are not capable of thinking in multiplications. We may have terrible time deciding on what to eat for lunch, and then make a snap business decision that will affect 10,000 people.
That’s why sometimes it will feel irrational when you only focus on things that matter. When you have 100 different things to do, it is hard to ignore 99 and just focus on 1. Things sometimes feel important even though they don’t matter.
“Search for things that grow unusually.”
Look out for growth in everything. Search for things that grow unusually. When you find something that grows unexpectedly give your complete attention to it. For example, we started giving our users ability to share their forms with other users. We had doubts at the beginning but in hindsight, it turned out to be a good decision. Unexpectedly, our users shared 5,000 forms and people used them 600,000 times when they needed to create a new form. This feature alone probably doubled the value of JotForm as a business, and it turned out to be a big time saver for our users.
In business, the most important decisions are the ones which are not asked to you. You might get asked to choose a color for your office walls, but nobody will ask you about a possible new approach that might double your business. You first need to decide that there is a need for a decision. Should we continue this path, or should we take a moment to consider a different path?
As a leader it is your responsibility to decide to stop, decide that there is a need for a new decision and make that decision. This can be really hard. But, ignoring things is the worst thing you can do. That’s a path to disaster. That’s exactly what you are doing when you are always busy with unimportant things.
Instead of making big decisions, you hide behind busyness. For me, the only way to break the busyness cycle is to have a single-minded focus on growth. When you stop worrying about things that don’t matter you have to face with decisions that really matter.
The idea of Passive Income is popular these days. Let’s make many shitty sites and passively earn money from them. It sounds good in theory but in reality nothing is passive. They’ll always take your time and energy. If you are just starting out and need to learn things, this is a great approach, go ahead and create many sites. You will learn a lot. But, don’t ever think this is a good business decision. In business, your biggest tool is your attention. Use it where it matters.
Today, take some time to find out what really matters to you and make a promise to yourself to single-mindedly focus on those things. Promise yourself to ignore the other 99 things.
