The Focus Box Theory
Here’s a concept I love for its simplicity and depth. It can be applied to both business and life.
There's a concept I love for its simplicity and depth: the “Focus Box Theory.”
Here’s how it works:
1️⃣ It involves writing on a piece of paper the professional activities we enjoy doing, activities that energize us rather than drain us. Tasks that we are naturally good at and are recognized by others. Sometimes, it might even feel like it’s not work at all. We’ll box all these words within a big box.
2️⃣ Next, outside the box, we jot down other tasks we frequently do during our day that we don’t necessarily enjoy. Whether it’s out of obligation, necessity, or because there’s potential benefit in doing them. Or maybe because others in our field are doing them, and we think we should too.
3️⃣ Then we consider if there is anything we aren’t doing often but would love to incorporate into our daily professional routine. We must be reasonably sure about how fulfilling it would be to do these things regularly (and if we’d actually enjoy them). And you know where we write this? INSIDE the box as well.
Now we have our most important professional goal on a piece of paper: to transition from outside the box to inside the box. To focus on doing only the things inside the box, ignoring those that stay outside.
▶️ Our focus should be on growing the activities inside the box, those we enjoy, that energize us and we excel at, until they become the source of our income, our professional specialization, and our growth.
Outside the box, you'll find very appealing things like the latest market trends or the recommendations from all those media-successful figures we follow (those who, having achieved so much success, now spend their days recording videos and posting on social media, which is a quite demanding task).
How to keep focus
🛡️ We need to develop a certain immunity to those messages that entice us to "step out of our box" and chase the latest shiny object. In this case, we genuinely want to stay inside the box and execute like pros.
What will happen if we do this? If we put our energy into performing the activities within the box, maintain an improvement mindset, and are persistent, two very curious things will happen over time:
By focusing on just a few things, we will become very good at them, increasing our market value. We'll achieve more success through compound interest, rather than wasting our efforts on a new specialization each time.
We'll have a wonderful "unfair advantage" in these activities because we'll enjoy doing them. We won’t tire out, we won’t give up, and others will feel like we do it effortlessly.
I loved a quote from Dwayne Johnson (The Rock), which goes something like this:
I wake up every day at four in the morning and start training. I give it my all, every day. Because I want to. NO ONE is going to out-train me. No one will endure that kind of pain. It is impossible to beat me.
Another example: Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympic athlete of all time, must have thought something similar when he decided to train even on Sundays, every Sunday of the year.
Counting the hours of extra training leading into each Olympic Games, with the 200 Sundays Phelps trained over his rivals, it’s "normal" he later dominated and took home all the medals.
We don’t have to be as extreme as The Rock or The Baltimore Bullet to succeed; we just need to be inspired by these examples and apply them to our reality.
Focus and advantage are concepts we can apply in many areas. To keep the focus 😉 on today's edition, let me share my view of these ideas applied to online business ⤵️
Applying the Box Theory to ecommerce
When engaging in the battle to grow an online business, everything is urgent, everything is important, everything is demanding. We compete with the entire world. It’s rarely easy to pause and draw boxes and think of superhumans who wake up at 4 am to lift heavy things. But that’s precisely where the error lies: doing everything, quickly, poorly, and with suffering, will not get us far.
Let me share the three steps I visualize to put the Box Theory (the name is awful, sorry) into practice for your online business:
1️⃣ The first thing you need to think about is how to shed the tasks you don’t want to do, to make room for the ones you do want to do, are good at, and will make a difference in the business (the ones inside the box). This has been invented for as long as commerce has existed; it’s called outsourcing, or delegating, or automating with the help of IA (that last one is more recent 🤖😉). You need to tackle this as soon as possible, or you will never be competitive in the online business space.
2️⃣ Next, with the space created by what you’ve delegated, think about how to execute tasks from inside your box in a way that is significant for the business; in a way that “moves the needle considerably” (an American term I love). It’s not about doing everything you like and is inside the box but selecting those tasks from that list which are most important for your business, role, job position, or project at this moment. If you need help finding this fit, do not hesitate to seek it; it will be the best money and time invested. Besides rowing hard, it is VITAL to row in the right direction.
3️⃣ Finally, like everything important in life, you’ll have to be a good “operator” and operate like a champ in your business. Again and again, you will put some of your box skills into play, and you will do it with pleasure. And you will do it with purpose. And you will do it with results. You will be leveraging your unfair advantage, and this will show in your business.
Seek you inspiration
There are countless examples of entrepreneurs leading online businesses who knew how to draw their box and execute what was inside. Let me show you one.
Ben Francis, young founder and “soul” of Gymshark, drew his box and had a clear idea of where he added the most value, to the extent that he handed over the leadership of his company to a professional business manager, who was a successful CEO for eight years. This way, Ben could focus on the vision of what he wanted to achieve with Gymshark and the Community needed for it. Read the story.
Takeaway thoughts
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between effort and result, sacrifice and success, luck and preparation.
I’m beginning to see patterns I didn’t see before, and I would love to go back in time with what I know now. But since that’s not possible, my idea is to learn from these patterns as soon as possible and apply them to my life, just as I am doing with the Box Theory.
If you want to do it too, here’s an interesting starting point: this video by Mark Manson stirred up many ideas I took for granted and has made me create new patterns related to effort and result, sacrifice and success, luck and preparation.
I recommend you look for your patterns and change your way of thinking.
Especially if you want different results, you know 😉