What I’ve learned as a startup founder & CEO — lesson four

To briefly recap, so far in this series we’ve covered:

1. The importance of storytelling,
2. why meditation and mindfulness are worth the investment, and
3. finally, we unwrapped the quote, “stay hungry, stay foolish”.

This week is all about focus.

We’re going to be looking at focus both in terms of personal development and in terms of running a startup.

Some of our generation’s greatest thinkers and innovators — Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet— have all been cited as having an incredible ability to focus.

Furthermore, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet went as far as crediting this trait as being the single most important factor in their success.

Even with the consensus among successful startups and entrepreneurs on the importance of focus, the advice continues to be difficult to follow.

Why?

In short, we all have an internal urge to be distracted. We avoid focusing on what matters most.

It’s easy to feel stuck. We feel powerlessly trapped doing things we couldn’t care less about, but feel like we have to or should do. When our true goals aren’t reached or even attempted, frustration and confusion set in.

“How do I break out of this cycle?”,

“Why can’t I find the time to do the things that are important to me?”,

What we should be asking is, “Why haven’t I been making the time?”

By framing it using these questions we tend to think of lack of focus in terms of temptations and interruptions; or more simply, externalities. This isn’t correct, to find the root cause we need to start our examination internally.

Oliver Burkeman describes this well:

….nobody diagnosed this problem as brilliantly as Friedrich Nietzsche, the cantankerous 19th-century German philosopher who argued in Unmodern Observations that we seek out distractions in order to stay mentally busy, so we can avoid facing up to the big questions — like whether we’re living genuinely meaningful lives. We tweet and click and dive into angry online arguments because “when we are alone and quiet, we fear that something will be whispered into our ear.” Worse still, even work that feels productive can really be a form of distraction, if it keeps us from addressing what’s most important. “How we labor at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary,” Nietzsche wrote, is because “it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”

Apologies for starting rather deep; for me personally, the notion of being busy to avoid addressing what’s most important resonated.

When I was working in banking it was easy to be knee-deep in tasks and never have a moment to come up for air — it was seen as a badge of honour to be visibly stressed and tired. It gave an excuse to not focus on the larger more important questions; for example, what did I want to accomplish from life, what would make me truly happy, how did I view and measure success, did I enjoy what I was doing, etc.

It reminded me of a quote by Steve Jobs:

When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it… Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

Jobs alluded to the fact that it was easy to go through life, accept the external distractions and “try not to bash into the walls too much”. Furthermore, he stressed the importance of taking a moment to reflect internally and answer those deeply personal questions. Once you do ask them, you’ll never be the same again. You will start building a plan for life, you’ll stop doing the things you don’t like and make time for the ones that are important to you.

Another explanation, underscored by psychological research, is that we’re desperate for a sense of autonomy, a feeling that we’re the ones in charge. Even if you’re the taskmaster delivering the orders — you rebel against yourself. All those tasks and chores on your to-do list that you had scheduled… simply don’t get done.

So, what can be done?

The internet is awash with tips on how to be more focused. There are also countless task tracking and productivity apps.

Personally, none of the apps have ever helped me (apart from Headspace — to help with meditation & focus). When I was studying I also found an app that made use of the pomodoro technique quite effective.

Nowadays, I am now a bit more old school.

1. Each Sunday I look to the week ahead and identify the highest priority items & tasks that I want to accomplish. E.g. when I reflect on the week that has just passed, what will give me the most satisfaction in marking as done. James Clear writes about a similar approach used by Warren Buffet.
2. Like the above, I start each day by thinking — what are the highest priority things that I want to get done, what will make me happy when reflecting that evening. Always a mixture of work, health and personal.
3. Finally, I always force myself to journal as much as I can. For three months I also forced myself to, every morning, write 3 things that I was thankful for. All with the goal of clarifying thoughts, surfacing deep worries, ensuring that I wasn’t holding anything in — ensuring that nothing was nagging away and taking up mental processing power.

Reading through business books, startup blogs, books, etc. you’ve probably read case studies on how important it is to focus, both from an operational and product perspective. The operational stuff such as using the build-measure-learn framework, working agile in weekly sprints, and generally ensuring the team are working together as one cohesive unit.

Couple operational perspective with product focus & you’ll typically hear “ensure you do one thing really well” repeated over and over. Along with the general mantra of simplifying.

Some common pitfalls for startups in the context of focus:

• Partnerships — as with everything there’s a balancing act to be had with regard to partnerships. A partnership can sometimes be the light at the end of the tunnel. The event that gives you some breathing space, and ultimately more runway. But a word of caution, when you raise a Seed or Series A round, and you start gaining press mentions you will receive inbound enquiries from corporates. Some of these biz dev teams will be on a fact finding mission, some of them will genuinely want to work with you. The key thing is to always be weighing up the time & effort required. Furthermore, remain critical on how much are you moving away from your roadmap. How long will it take you to prepare and execute upon the corporates wishes? Don’t spend time executing an unfocused dream.
• Temptation of big markets — don’t try and run before you can walk. Nearly every startup is better focusing on building a product that a small group of people love rather than building for a large group of people that are agnostic. If you have built an educational platform for a certain segment, stick to that segment — don’t start expanding into other segments or other verticals.
• Lack of transparency — thankfully this isn’t that common in startup world. In the early days you are working with a tight knit group of people, who you ultimately hired and have faith in. You will gain a lot more respect and a lot more output from the team if they are involved, if they know what’s going on and contribute to the why and what. If you fail to be transparent, soon you will be dealing with office politics, and people playing favourites — generally the team will not be focused upon building the best product.
• The thoughtless “yes” — and article on Yahoo puts this best:

The early years of a startup can be chaotic and desperate. Even a great idea needs capital to get off the ground. In the beginning you need cash, so you chase every opportunity. You say “yes” to anything and everything because you need clients; you need investment; you need to turn your idea into an actual business. You are excited and you want to grow, so everyone who offers you money is a potential client, a potential investor, someone you need.Unfortunately, every thoughtless “yes” leads you further into a trap. Too quickly you’ll take on too many things. You’ll have differentiated into too many products, options, and services, in an effort to please anyone who shows even a hint of interest in your company. In a few years, your company is just okay at a whole bunch of things instead of great at a few.

• Not using the problem priority matrix — last week I wrote about the ‘two most important trackers for your startup’, one of them was the problem priority matrix. Simply put, it’s a matrix that allows you to highlight the most critical problems facing the business, what the current metric is attributed to each of those problems, what you want that metric to be and an ordered list of deliverables that will impact upon each of those problems. Another great exercise in focusing is using a dashboard, but instead of having a busy dashboard, just have two numbers. The two numbers will be related to one metric you want to focus on. What the business & metric is currently, and what the target metric is. Everyone in the business will instantly start to move and execute that metric.

Thanks for making it to the end of the article, and as always if you enjoyed it I would greatly appreciate you sharing & recommending. As mentioned, I’ve only started writing, hopefully each week I am slowly getting better. I also send out a weekly newsletter detailing what I have been reading each week — it’s usually focused on startups, tech, personal development, product management, development & economics.