As part of my personal challenge to write about a book every month, I picked up the perfect book to start my year of focus – “The Power of Focus” and I am glad I did.
Author: Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Les Hewitt
Rating: 5 star
Introduction
The book offers practical advice on how to achieve success by forming good habits, setting goals, overcoming obstacles, and other strategies, and focusing on them with intention.
Main Ideas and Insights
The book discusses eleven focus strategies with actionable steps and a number of examples. To keep the article at a reasonable length, I am splitting it into two parts. Part1 summarizes six out of the eleven strategies. Each strategy lists the principle behind it, how to implement it, and my insights for some of them.
1. Your habits determine your future
Principle: Successful people have successful habits
How to implement: Study the habits of successful people. Identify your bad or unproductive habits. Define new successful habit to replace the bad ones. Create three part action plan – what are the three immediate action steps and put them in practice.
2. It’s not hocus-pocus, it is all about focus
Principle: Focus on your strengths. What do you do effortlessly without a lot of preparation?
How: Study what is working and not working in life. What creates victories? What brings poor results? This requires clear thinking.
3. Do you see the big picture?
Principle: Develop unusual clarity of what you want
How:
- The book talks about setting aside some time every week to think, reflect and create an exciting picture of your future.
- Use the goal prioritization technique the March Madness way by Kevin W McCarthy to determine your 1 year, 3 year and 5 year goals.
- The key is to set goals, prioritize, plan, visualize, think, reflect and review.
Insights: The best way to get most out of a non-fiction book (especially self-improvement), is to spend some time to do the suggested exercises and document the outcome. This takes time to do it well. I tried out a few strategies for fun and the March madness style goal prioritization technique is one of them. It did feel good to be able to do the exercise and figure out what matters the most for me in 1 year, 3 years and 5 years down the lane.
4. Overcoming failures
Principle: It is not what happens to you but what you do about it that counts.
How: Define your vision. When you have a vision, when you fail, you limit your options and your decisions become easy and it is easy to push forward and eventually succeed. If you are still stuck, make a list of ten options to improve your situation, put them in writing and then choose the one that seems to fit best and make an action plan.
Insights:
- One of my favorite quotes that reminded me when reading this chapter is: “If you never want to be criticized, for goodness sake don’t do anything new” – Jeff Bezos.
- Make overcoming failure a habit. Since childhood, my mom has emphasized giving our 100% effort, without placing excessive emphasis on the final outcome. It has been ingrained in my head so much that I rarely regret about the past. As a result, when I make a mistake, I do feel disappointed but try to quickly shift my focus to what I can control, which is the action and what to do next. Is it always easy? No, but the power of habit makes it achievable. It resonated a lot with this chapter.
- Another thing that reminded me of this principle: There are output and input goals. Output goals are very critical to the teams and key to the org. They provide a vision for us. But sometimes they are out of our control and could be influenced by external factors. So we also track input goals, which we can control. We put in 100% effort to reach the input goals and the right input goals and their success will lead to the output goals eventually, if not immediately. The point being, focus on what we can control.
5. Building Excellent Relationships
Principle: The true joy in life comes from spending time with people who constantly inspire, nourish and replenish your soul
How?
- When you review in detail how you developed your best relationships, it provides a unique process for creating bigger and better future relationships
- Surround yourself with positive people
- 3 simple, powerful questions that are foundations for strong relationships: Do I like them? Do I trust them? Do I respect them?
- “And then some technique”: This can be applied at home or at work. Ask the other person (family member or your coworker) on a weekly basis: How would you rate my performance as XYZ during the last week? Once they give an answer, ask “What would I have needed to do to make it a ten?”. The books does say that this might sound weird but do it anyways for results.
Insights: Being an introvert, this is one of my growth areas for sure. I am looking forward to implementing a couple of the strategies.
6. The confidence factor
Principle: Everything you want is on the other side of fear
How:
- Confidence grows by doing, not thinking. Only action produces results.
- Document your daily wins.
- Read inspiring biographies and autobiographies
- Coach yourself just like how you would help another person overcome a challenge.
- Be grateful.
Insights: First, the book lists a set of common fears and some strategies to encounter each fear, which is super helpful. Second, the act of gratitude is very powerful. I read that when we feel truly grateful about something or someone, Hypothalamus is activated. Gratitude floods our brain with a chemical called dopamine, which is a happiness neurotransmitter.
If you find these strategies helpful, I would recommend you read the book! I will cover the remaining five out of eleven strategies in Part 2. Stay tuned!
