Soft Skills for the Professional Services Industry

CHAPTER 3Focus

FOCUS IS THE CENTRAL key to professional and private success. It is important to concentrate on a few essentials. Focus is the key to results and ultimately to success. You can be busy with many things at the same time, but you cannot be successful in many areas at the same time. Reduce everything in your professional and private life to the essentials. In other words, ignore all the things you could be doing and instead do only what you should be doing. The principle of focus means that you recognize that not all things are equally important. You need to identify the things that are most important, the things that are top priority.

NOTE

Applying the principle of focus makes the difference between success and failure. The key to a professional's success is that they know their key tasks. Professionals should work only on those.

This is why the principle of focus is so important. Your lack of focus will bog you down in details. Those who cannot distinguish essentials from non‐essentials will not be able to manage themselves, or others well. The results will be far from a top‐notch performance. A professional who does not know exactly what the essential things on the to‐do list are, is not a professional, but an amateur.

TIP

Hidden champions, secret winners, or unknown world market leaders are relatively unknown companies that are market leaders in their industry. They are characterized by the fact that they operate in a specialized niche. Professionals ...