Achieving strategic clarity is hard. It takes asking tough questions about tradeoffs, deep concentration to get to the very essence of the issues and real courage to cut off competing priorities. It is worth the effort because with real clarity, people, teams and organizations can fully mobilize, break through to the next level and achieve... See more
One of the things Steve [Jobs] would say [to me] because he was worried I wasn’t focused — he would say, “How many things have you said no to?” I would tell him I said no to this. And I said no to that. But he knew I wasn’t interested in doing those things. There was no sacrifice in saying no [to those things]. What focus means is saying no to... See more
Anyone can say no to crappy opportunities. Only a master will say no to good opportunities. If you don’t say no to good opportunities, you’ll never have the time to pursue great opportunities.
Saying no is hard. Nobody knew that better than Steve Jobs, who said:
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not
Focus, as Steve Jobs said, is about saying no.
The only dangerous competitors are focused ones.
Ergo there are things that even the most dangerous competitors say no to, and it would be worth thinking explicitly about what those are.
If you look around, you’ll notice the people and organizations moving the fastest are the focused ones. Not only do they focus on a few ideas, but within the scope of those ideas, they are able to focus on the key variables.
Identifying the variables that matter comes with focus. When you commit to living in a problem, you understand things about... See more
re: many genAI apps can do 'anything and everything'
i used to tell this funny story to a lot of consumer founders:
when one-shot TTS first started to work, someone made a website where you could deepfake anyone's voice (long before ElevenLabs quality). it had a complicated UX and got little... See more
Why do some people achieve so many of the things they want, and others not? Do people have a fixed budget of things they can achieve in a lifetime? It doesn’t seem so. Rather, it seems like our achievement budget is a function of the number of priorities we have. Interestingly, it seems to be a nonlinear function. Meaning that if you go from 4... See more