What's your focus ?

Jae Jong (auntie Jong) has been making fried pork for many years. From 6 AM until closing at 4 PM, there is a line in front of the shop. Around noon time, the line is 3 times as long as in the picture taken at 8 AM. 

The food shop next to that of Jae Jong makes "anything you want" (made-to-order). There are plenty of empty seats available at all times.

Jae Jong only does fried pork. Not fried chicken, beef or fish. She sells tens of kilos of it every day. She has a single shop and never opened any branch, although her reputation would undoubtedly make other branches successful. Her shop has no air-conditioning and hasn't changed for ages. She never innovated on her fried pork. There is only one kind of fried pork; no sugar-coated friend pork, no chill-dipped fried pork and no 'design-your-own' fried pork.  There's only Jae Jong's fried pork.

Jae Jong has remained focused on making the best fried pork, believing that people would come and come back for it. And they do, standing in line in the sun and heat every day (the shop does not have a day off). 

I see many entrepreneurs struggling with focus. It is very tempting to add something interesting onto your portfolio, if it brings an immediate opportunity (a new client !). It is hard to say no when you are in need of business. So one client asks something, and they think "Why not, I could do this and I can always refocus later on." And then another client comes up with something else again. Or they see or read something and think that this could be cool as a new product or service. Quickly, they become average at doing many things, rather than excellent in doing one thing. Very hard to get your focus back once you've given it up.

Staying focused works. Yes, it takes time. But people will come back for your product or service if they know yours is the best around.

 

Learning by doing is not enough

We all know the saying that we learn by doing, not by sitting to listen to a lecture. And it's not just a saying, research has confirmed this (see the picture). Real learning happens only when we do stuff.\

Have you ever spent a full day doing plenty of stuff ... ? For sure you have. Meetings, reviews, phone calls, discussions, preparing a presentation, dealing with all the emails that pop up without interruption. So much doing, the whole day long ! With hardly time to breathe in between these events. Lunch lasts about 20 minutes, or happens at your desk, doing some more email stuff. So on your way home, at then end of that busy day where you did so much, what was playing in your mind ? Were you telling yourself "Wow, so a great day full of learning by doing !". Probably not. It was more something like "Thank God this day is over and done with !". So there was all that doing, but apparently no learning ? What is missing to turn doing into real learning ?

Doing requires an external focus. And thinking or reflecting brings an internal focus. Recent research lead by HBR has shown that the internal focus, of thinking or reflecting, increases the learning retention by up to 22%. How do you bring this internal focus into a busy day of doing ? The key trick is to use questions ! Spending some time at the end of a day, or better still, at different times during the day, to ask yourself a few questions, makes all the difference. Questions such as ... How was this meeting ? Did we achieve the objectives ? How was the team dynamic ? What was the quality of the decisions we took ? How was this meeting different from the one before ? These simple questions and the reflection that follows them, are where the doing gets transformed into learning. Reflecting on what we did, why things happened they way they happened, is where the learning happens, not just in the doing part.

Now all this thinking and reflecting does not need to take more than 5 minutes, so "We are really so busy" is not a valid excuse ! And if you skip the reflection part, you will just move from doing lots of stuff one day, to doing even more stuff the next day. Train yourself to reflect and help yourself learn on how to grow. Even on a busy day.