Focus Means Saying No to Hundreds of Other Good Ideas

Focus Steve Jobs understood focus very well: “People think focus means saying yes to what you want to focus on. That is not what focus means at all. Focus means saying no to the hundreds of other good ideas… Deciding what not to do is just as important as deciding what to do.” When leading Apple, he took the company’s one hundred most important employees away for a meeting each year to discuss, “What are the ten things we should do next?” After several rounds of debate, they would identify the ten things they most ought to do. Jobs would then cross out the last seven and announce, “We can only do the first three.” Warren Buffett offered this advice: “First, write your top twenty-five life goals on a piece of paper. Next, select the top five. Finally, put the remaining twenty goals on a list of things to avoid at all costs.” ----- Robin: “We often tell children to concentrate and not get distracted, but adults are actually even more easily distracted and struggle to restrain themselves. “Focus sounds simple. Yet when we encounter a growth bottleneck, it becomes hard to resist doing a few more things so that it looks as though we are growing. This is especially true when operating only in the Taiwan market, where we run into the question of what else we must do in order to grow.”