Too much focus on detail can kill your business. Of course, carelessness in regard to detail can damage as well – but more people realise, and have no problem addressing, that side of the coin. So, how on earth can focusing too much on detail hurt your business?
A short story:
A young child tries to copy his older sibling who can walk a few metres, quite effortlessly, along a railroad track. (Don’t worry, it’s an abandoned track). He keeps trying, but can never take more than a few steps without falling off. It’s infuriating, because it’s not difficult. This is no high wire tightrope and the track is almost wide enough to stand on with both feet side-by-side.
So the kid concentrates even more carefully, watching his feet with each step to try and maintain balance and move forward. Still, he fails, until eventually the older sibling decides to cut him some slack and explain how its done. The older sibling tells the boy to focus on a point a ways down the track. Don’t look right down at your feet, he is told.
By setting a goal and focusing on it, the boy finds he can walk that track as easily as if he were walking on level ground. It was only when he concentrated too hard on each tiny step that he tripped up.
It works that way with business, too. Our natural reaction is to put all our attention into “watching our feet” as we deal with this short-term detail. But when we do that, we “fall off the track” and fail to move forward in the direction we’d like to go.
This is not to say you should ignore details of professional business management while you gaze wistfully toward your vision of Fortune 500-esque success. You never get anywhere without taking step after step, after step to reach your goal. But you never get anywhere, either, if all you look at is the present step.
The point in the distance that you need to focus on is the need your customer/audience has, and the solution you have to fulfill it. It requires you to understand your target market – who they are, what they need and what concerns stand in the way of them choosing your solution.
It’s way too easy for us to focus on details. For example, a website owner can lose themselves amid the latest traffic building tips and tools, or the latest bells and whistles that could spruce up the site. Details are usually driven by facts, and facts are something we feel we can learn and control. Understanding the people who make up our pool of potential customers is a lot more scary. It requires us to step outside ourselves into the hearts and minds of other people.
Given the choice between dealing with predictable facts and details or dealing with unpredictable human nature, most of us will jump at dealing with facts every time. But that just gets us stuck staring at our own feet.
The only way to stay on track is by looking toward your ultimate goal: you helping people solve some problem in return for them repaying you fairly for the time and effort you put into it.
That’s really the most simple definition of what business is. The details are not your business. The facts and the tips and the tools are not your business either. They’re merely the steps you take to get to that point in the distance. And the more you take that to heart, the more easily you’ll stay on the track toward your goal.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I’ve just discovered your website through the North West News and found this article to be so relevant to me at my stage of setting up my business. I have been floundering around in minutiae an awful lot of the time, and so wasting a lot of my energy in what if’s, etc, that I’m left exhausted!! I am delighted to have found this site. Thank you.