100 year old, Incredibly wealthy businessman was asked to document all his wisdom, so that it could be shared and used to help others reach success in their own lives, and business.
Interviewer was stunned when he finally came up to meet this very successful, and much loved businessman, only to find that he only wrote down a couple of paragraphs on a piece of paper as documentation on how he became wealthy.
The interviewer, asked the man, is this it? This is all you wrote down?
How on earth can a couple of paragraphs be all there is to know from 100 years on this planet, and the vasts amount of wealth you’ve amassed?
To which the old businessman replied…
“You see, that’s the problem. You can hand this piece of paper to a young person, and they will open it and read it, and they will think they understand it, but they will disregard it, and they will go on looking for some more fanciful, complicated, seemingly mysterious ideas in order to capture their success.
And it won’t be until someone arrives, 100 years later when they’re contemplating their life, and trying to make sense of it, that they will then reread this piece of paper and say to themselves… that was it, everything needed to know, to be extraordinary wealthy, well respected and very much loved, appears on this piece of paper.”
What he wrote on the piece of paper was, “Only a few things really matter; to anything. You want to find those few things, and you want to stick to them, and then you want to master them”.
You know:
We’re always looking for what’s new. What’s shiny. But in the end, only a few things really matter.
Isn’t that what the 80/20 rule is all about?
Focusing on the very few things that bring the best results, and working really hard to master them?
Even Warren Buffet said that his reason for success, was saying no to 99 investments out of every 100.
And what we see every day, are people floundering about trying to do 100 things at once.
Jumping onto anything new that comes along.
We have people with their blogs, fan pages, twitter, pinterest, email marketing, funnels. forums, etcetera… and yet… chances are that only 1 or 2 of the things they work on, is bringing in most of their results. Their traffic is just garbage except for a few of those channels.
But rather than ditching the time wasters, they still try to do everything.
Take myself for example. I’m not filthy rich, nor have I the ambition to be so. I live comfortably – and all I do is marketing with organic traffic behind it.
I create a couple of products that sell very well, I build my email list… and I send emails relentlessly promoting those products.
That’s it.
I could have Twitter accounts. Flakebook fan pages, and all the rest, but I know they would only be responsible for a small fraction of my output.
That’s 80/20.
For productivity: I focus on 3 tasks a day. That’s it. Not 9 or 10; just 3. And I’m more productive than I’ve ever been… but that wouldn’t be hard considering I only work on a small number profit producing tasks anyway.
Struggling?
Cut down on the amount of stuff you’re focusing on.
Ditch the time wasting tasks and ONLY focus on the profit producing activities.
Focusing on the traffic that delivers the results and disregarding the rest is really all there is to it.
Sure, as you move forward you can add new things to your bag, but by that time you’ll have systemized everything to run, more or less, on autopilot.
