Success Is All About Focus

It hit me yesterday that, perhaps more than anything else, success is all about focus.

I often find reading Steve Pavlina’s blog motivates me to strive for higher levels of success. To take productivity as an example, check out Steve’s 33 Rules to Boost Your Productivity. They’re quite useful in that format, broken down into 33 bite-sized suggestions. But essentially, I think all of them can be boiled down to the issue of focus.

I find that focus is generally quite easy for most people to achieve for a short period of time (if you’re enthusiastic about something, and if you have any gumption at all). However — and I imagine I’m not alone — I find it rather difficult to maintain a high level of focus on a goal over the long-term.

I tend to set lots of very ambitious goals for myself. Some of them don’t go anywhere right from the start, for various reasons:

• it wasn’t something I was passionate about in the first place, so I had little or no motivation to achieve it; or
• the goal simply wasn’t realistic, given the circumstances of my life.

But I’m not talking about these types of failed attempts. I’m talking about the goals that have become the impetus for significant positive progress.

In the last year, for example, I have made drastic changes to my eating habits, my commitment to exercise, and the time I wake up in the morning. However — even in these areas, in which I have experienced enormous benefits from achieving my goals — as surprising as it may seem, my level of commitment has slowly (and often indiscernibly) dwindled.

I don’t recall ever having taken the time to reflect on this reality, and so I have never identified why this happens. But yesterday, for the first time, I asked myself the question: Why, after reaping great benefits from reaching a goal, would you ever allow your dedication to it to peter out?

As I thought about this question, it occurred to me that there are lots of things conspiring against focus. Some are challenges to my ability to focus:

• As time passes, I let myself become side-tracked by various setbacks (e.g., sickness, stress, commitments), and then fail to “climb back on the horse” as it were.
• Sometimes I get distracted by other interests and new goals.

Some are symptoms of insufficient focus:

• Occasionally I become complacent because of the success I have achieved, assuming I will be able to maintain it with no effort.
• Often I simply forget to keep working at it!

These are the types of things that derail me.

I haven’t abandoned the three goals I mentioned above. In fact, I can honestly say I am still fully committed to them (despite some blips along the way). My frustration lies in my inability to sustain uninterrupted focus on goals that, without a doubt, are helping me become more successful.

With everything I hope to accomplish over the next few years, I need to reach a higher level of focus if I am going to be successful. I expect, therefore, that I’ll be doing a lot of thinking about focus. And I will certainly be working hard to develop strategies that will help me avoid the focus fizzle to which I’ve become accustomed.

As you strive for excellence in your life, how do you avoid the gradual erosion of commitment to your goals?

What strategies help you stay focused on your goals for long periods of time — even in the face of setbacks, distractions, and everything life throws at you?

Making Room for Innovation

By day, I work at the University of Waterloo. This afternoon I attended one of the keynote addresses that was part of the 2010 Staff Conference.

Jeremy Gutsche, Chief Trend Hunter at TrendHunter.com was speaking, and his talk was entitled, “Creating a Culture of Innovation and Customer Obsession.” (Incidentally, Jeremy’s company, which is located in Toronto, has hired 12 uWaterloo co-op students over the years.)

Here are a few of the most memorable moments for me:

1.  Your organization always needs to have a clear and compelling answer to the question: Specifically what are you trying to do?

2.  Times of crisis and chaos present incredible opportunites for organizations that have their eye on new trends and are on the look-out for consumer needs emerging out of the crisis.

3.  “Complacency will be the architecture of your downfall. … There is no point innovating if you think you already know all the answers!” Organizations often try to get better by optimizing their current products and processes slightly, rather than being open to completely re-thinking what they do.

4.  In any industry, innovation starts by observing your customers and interacting with them. You need to understand and become irresistable to your target audience.

5.  For your messages to make a huge impact in this information-saturated world, they must be simple, direct, and supercharged.

Jeremy’s talk was very entertaining and thought-provoking on many fronts. But what struck me the most was what he said about making space to be innovative.

uWaterloo is, of course, the perfect place to have this discussion, since (in Canada, at least) we’re generally recognized as having cornered the market on innovation.

There is no doubt that uWaterloo has had quite a number of high-profile world-changing innovations in its short history. But within my team in the Office of Development, the topic of innovation has come up a lot lately, and we’ve been asking ourselves some tough questions.

When we look at our programs and how we do business from day to day, can we honestly say we’re innovative?

My team agreed that there is no shortage of creative ideas. Most of the people I work with are smart, motivated, and committed to uWaterloo’s success. We come away from most of our brainstorming sessions with page upon oversized page of great ideas.

But my colleagues also agreed that we are not nearly as good at nurturing these ideas and seeing them all the way through to the end — from analyzing their merit, to coming up with a plan, to implementing them, to measuring their success, to learning from our mistakes.

So if we admit we’re not as innovative as we’d like to be, what are we to do?

Jeremy shared some interesting things about how an organization can be successful in this area. For one, it needs to be “institutionally tolerable to explore new pastures.” I think uWaterloo gets an ‘A’ for effort here — we are encouraged to think outside the box and have a high degree of freedom to imagine innovative ways of doing things.

But Jeremy also pointed out that new ideas don’t flourish well when constrained by rigid control processes, and where there isn’t a willingness to fail.

This raises some interesting questions for an enormous institution like uWaterloo, and I put them out there for discussion:

1.  Is it possible for a big organization, which requires an extensive bureaucracy to function, to be nimble enough to nurture and sustain true innovation?

2.  Is uWaterloo’s culture one where failure is accepted as an important part of innovating?

3.  What would it take for uWaterloo to become truly, undeniably, and consistently innovative — all the way from our day-to-day microprocesses to our institutional aspirations?

An Unexpected Collision of Mindless Prose and Poetry

Today I wrote an email, just like any of the other 50+ emails I write every day at work.

Except it wasn’t just like every other email!

When I went back to re-read it just before clicking “Send” (which I am wont to do), I realized it was, in fact, a masterpiece. It was a thing of beauty, with a lilt and cadence I fear too few of my emails possess.

I feel compelled to share it with the world:

Today's Poetic Email

If you have had a similar experience — where the mundane has been unexpectedly infused with the ineffable (like Average Adam’s perfect question mark, for example) — please share.

Setting My Thoughts Free

I spent a great deal of time over the past weekend thinking about whether or not blogging is for me. I have decided that it is.

Even though my wife has accused me at times of being overly methodical and meticulous – we’re still in discussions about whether or not these are actually faults  ;) – before I completely throw myself into this, I need to articulate why I’m doing this and what I hope to accomplish.

1.  I think most clearly when I take the time to put my thoughts into writing.

2.  The more writing I am doing at a given point in my life, the better able I am to verbalize my thoughts in face-to-face interactions.

Compelling though these two motives may be, it was a third that, in the end, actually pushed me over the edge, giving me the final impetus to go for it:

3.  Throughout my life, I have been told that I have some great ideas that really should be shared with the world. The message has been consistent and ubiquitous, coming from a wide range of people – many of whom have known me well, and many of whom have hardly known me at all.

I’m not always convinced of the value of what I have to offer. (I am more than a little embarrassed by the fact that I’ve only just recently figured out what I want to do when I grow up … not really something for a 34-year-old to brag about!) But nonetheless, I want to start listening to those who’ve encouraged me to put my brain to good use for the betterment of the world.

It is time to set my thoughts free.

While I’m not comfortable pronouncing on the meaning of life vis-à-vis purpose and destiny (more on that in future blogs, I suspect), I can’t shake the sense that, if I can do some small thing that will make the world an even slightly better place, then I should do so.

So, what is this blog about, and where will all this self-expression lead? I have a couple ideas for focused blogs on specific topics, which I hope to undertake in the near future, and which will likely require their own homes. But I consider Ryan’s Ruminations my space for exploring the whole range of what goes on in my head, and sharing my personal journey.

As such, I am giving myself permission to write about anything and everything here. I believe I have some interesting thoughts on everything from my pet peeves and books I’m reading to relationships, religion, and life in general – and I’m excited to begin writing about them.

I hope that my thoughts and experiences resonate with at least a few others.