Focus for Success

Category: Self-Improvement

Published: 02/16/2010 03:33 a.m.

20 years ago, focus wasn't such a big problem because people didn't have many other options. Being a graphics professional meant owning expensive equipment or very expensive computers and software. If you wanted to be published, there was almost no way to do this on your own. You needed to work with a publishing company and that was often a long uphill battle. Even a career in marketing would require knowing the right people and having the right education and experience to match.

Knocking down the Barrier

Technology has done a wonderful job at breaking down these high barriers to entry. You can be a graphics pro with a cheap computer and cheap (or free) software. Likewise you can self publish online with a variety of free or cheap platforms. And becoming a marketer can be easy using free online tools. The problem with reducing the barrier to entry, though, is that the community/market/audience becomes saturated with people with little talent.

Part of the great thing about a very high barrier to entry is that only the capable and talented were able to climb that wall. Hiring a designer with a top firm meant you would get a premium product, though this also meant a premium price. Now you can get a bargain basement designer, but as the old adage says, you get what you pay for. So, how does a high barrier to entry correlate with a premium candidate on the other side? The answer is focus.

A person had to be very focused on what they wanted to do if they had any chance at breaking into that market. You had to be really serious about graphic design if you were going to justify spending thousands of dollars on the required equipment. You had to spend the time getting a degree and working at firms to practice and hone your trait if you were going to have access to some of the great work that was being done in the field. A nobody off the street couldn't decide one day they wanted to be a graphics pro. But technology has "fixed" this problem for us.

From a buyer's perspective, this is painful because there are far too many options, and the ones that are most marketed are often not the best options. But I'm much more interested in what's good for the maker. By lowering the barrier to entry, the market entices people to take up new hobbies and activities. People can now choose to be whatever they want, and can do so quickly and easily. New technology is like a miracle drug for work. Little to no cost and effort and you can be a web designer! No need for expensive school or tools. Pay a little money now and be whatever you've always wanted to be.

This is poisonous. I know because I've been there. I wasted lots of time trying out new things and being a make-believe professional at something I had only done for 50+ hours. That's not even equal to a single semester course. I was robbing myself of focus. By bouncing from new technology to new technology and coding to design to publishing I wasn't able to focus or improve on a single thing. I kept switching ideas because I was running into the hidden barrier.

The Hidden Barrier

Technology took away the clear barrier to entry, but it doesn't remove the hidden one. The hidden barrier is the one that requires work to get over. It requires sweat and experience and hours upon hours of doing something over and over. In the past we never saw this wall. We were pushed away from things because of the high barrier to entry, but never realized that when you climb that wall, you also gain the strength to climb the hidden barrier of experience. The technology barrier was easy to break down, but until we get instant learning a-la The Matrix, we will still struggle when we hit the hidden barrier.

This hidden wall makes things worse in another way. When I hit the wall in programming, I then moved my hobby to design. And I worked for a few hours and gained a tiny ounce of experience, and then I hit the hidden wall of graphics and again moved on to something else. The low barrier to entry plus a high barrier of experience causes us to move from thing to thing and never really learn how to do anything. It removes any reason to focus.

I still struggle with focus because I'm not exactly sure what I want to be doing. There is no shame in wanting to dabble and try new things, but you must be aware that you are doing so. Do not kid yourself into thinking that every six months you become an expert in something new. In reality, you are dabbling and quitting and trying something new. I am now aware of this. Along with that awareness is a desire to not dabble. There is a desire to focus.

Focus for Success

The formula to success has always and will always be simple. Do something for a long time until you are very good at it. Become an expert first, and then figure out the sales and marketing and other stuff. In the long run, a great designer just getting started in marketing will do better than a crappy designer who has good marketing. It's a tortoise and hare story. The current problem I see in many places is that people keep skipping the part where you spend thousands of hours becoming an expert. They just jump to the marketing tricks and sales techniques and stay mediocre forever. I want something better than this.

Of the many things I have dabbled in, "explaining" seems like the best fit for focus. I am very good at learning things quickly and then explaining them to someone else. Someday this could be teaching, but now I think writing is the best place for it. My formula for success is to focus on getting very good at explaining things to other people. I consider myself a great analogist (person who makes analogies) and am improving on my ways with words. Right now it takes me over a thousand words to accurately explain something, and my goal is to lower that to a few hundred.

Focusing on something will get you much farther in the long-term than dabbling will. The tough decision is deciding what to focus on. Try to pick something that you know will be around in 20 years. That often means abstracting the technology that is in front of something. My focus on explaining things can be in person (public speaking), in writing (here or in documents), in video online, or possibly in a classroom setting. My current job in SEO is all about explaining things (to Google and to content writers). I am confident there will still be a need to explain things in 2030.

What will you decide to focus on? You may still need some time to dabble, and that's OK. Just understand that dabbling is not the same as gaining experience just as tasting a wine is not the same a drinking a bottle of it. Once you found what you want to do, start doing it. It will still be tough, but the long term effect is success, and that's what it is all about.