I put all of my focus into what I was doing, and tuned out 99% what other people were doing. They took my eye off the ball from what actually mattered, which ironically is what prevented me from getting the very startup success I was worried about.Ī few years back, right as I was starting to build, I looked back on all the silly stuff I was worried about and decided to test my experiment. I’d start wondering what I needed to do – to change tomorrow – to get that kind of outcome.Īll of these things were not only a giant waste of my time, they were a waste of a far more precious commodity – my focus. Or, I’d read a story of how some company just sold for a billion dollars. I’d start wondering if I could raise at that valuation, and then spend the next day running cycles on what my investor deck might look like. I’d listen to another Founder tell me he just raised money at a $100 million valuation. Or, I’d be at a dinner party among Founders. I’d then start worrying about that problem. He’d make some comment about how my startup would run into a problem as he saw it. I would have a coffee with a Venture Capitalist and we’d talk about a startup I was working on. Now if you do that constantly, over a long enough period of time, all of those tiny holes start to let all of the water gush out. Every time you distract yourself with some silly startup success act you poke a tiny hole in that bucket.
Think of your focus like water in a bucket. It wasn’t a time savings, it was a focus savings. It wasn’t costing me that much time to begin with. What was interesting wasn’t that I freed up some extra time by not checking social media, taking meetings and all the other senseless BS. I had this theory years ago that there was some amount of time that I had invested in worrying about my “startup success”, and that if I could re-allocate that time into something more useful (literally anything) that I’d sort of find this treasure trove of both happiness and focus. It’s amazing what happens when you cut out all of the things that buy you nothing and instead focus on the things that actually matter.
It was the most life changing thing I ever did. I focused on my own business and stopped worrying about what everyone else was doing. I won because I decided to not give a shit about any of that. No, I didn’t sell my company for a billion dollars.
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