Yes Focus is Important, and Yes it is A Luxury

By Afrig Wasiso, Co Founder – CEO of Inspira Group

One of the most important takeaways from 2020 for me, is about focus. And strongly related to focus, is about momentum.

Life can be very fleeting. I’ve learnt that. It has moments you should seize.

The value of each day in our business life doesn’t have the same weight. Some days are more precious than others. Days when business is easy, like you are sailing in the same direction as the wind, those are precious days. It means, you are having your moment. You are enjoying momentum. That’s, my friend, moments we should seize by focusing on that thing, and that thing only.

In the past few years I made some bad decisions. It wasn’t entirely my decision. It was an order that I accepted without question. Instead of focusing on a single area that has momentum, I was leaving. 

It was clearly a stupid decision looking from today’s point of view. But at that time, it made sense to do what I did. “Things are good, it’s time to give it to someone else, and leave.” hahaha.

Momentum is built with focus. When you have momentum, it should be retained and re-build with focus.

We love seeing things finding its form, from nothing into something. We love seeing things accumulating, becoming better and better. We will be unbeatable, only if we are focusing on improving things everyday. It is an infinite process that needs infinite focus.

You can not succeed by being marginally better than your competition. You have to be extremely better. And that’s why you need to be focused on what you do. Because you need to out-work everyone. That’s the simple logic of how to be better than anyone else.

The best luxury a business leader could get is to have trust from the shareholders to focus on long term goals, for a long period of time.

To have the sport analogy, it is different to see a football club that changes their club’s manager every year compared to seeing Sir. Alex Ferguson stayed at Man United for 26 years, winning 38 trophies including two Champions League titles and became the richest football club in the world.

We can say, oh it’s a luxury to be given 26 years to build something. Lucky him. But I am sure, the trust is there because leaders like Sir Alex work really hard to keep the trust. 

Yes, focus is important, and yes focus is a luxury. It’s not the kind of luxury that is given, you have to earn it.