You know we are big on focus. Mick’s focus talk is famous through-out the startup world and we even published a book on the subject. But focus is hard. Mick even starts his talk these days with the confession that he is terrible at it. Frankly, we all are. We all know that it is the only way to win and yet we spin up multiple threads, each one a potential distraction in our mission to win.
When Mick and I were starting out with Pollenizer, Mike Cannon-Brookes from Atlassian shared a small bundle of papers that he found inspiring and I find myself repeatedly returning to one of them. What makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial? It brings a helpful perspective on why focus is hard.
At the heart of it there is this diagram.
We see that the entrepreneur takes a collection of ‘given means’ and then starts working towards multiple possible ‘imagined ends’. In it’s essence, entrepreneurship requires that we get multiple plates spinning. The art and science of entrepreneurship is to know how to manage your plates. Our process is simple:
- Don’t be afraid to start a new plate spinning, but know what you want to learn and how you will measure it before you start
- Review your plates regularly and decide which to focus on (invest most resources here), which to continue (allow but minimal resources), which to stop or refuse (we won’t do if you pay us because it is a distraction from the core). This normally looks like a table with 3 columns FOCUS | DO | DON’T