Stephen Covey defined, “Begin with the end in mind” as the second of the seven habits of highly effective people in his best selling book.

The reason that reverse engineering the goal is so key is that it shows you exactly what you need to do today, this week, this month and this quarter to move towards your end goal - your dream business and aspirational life. When you don’t begin with the end in mind and start working on actions and tasks that seem like the right thing to do in the moment, you almost always work on the wrong things.

You get busy - and busy is the enemy of success.

You start building a YouTube channel, because everyone else is doing it so must be the right thing to do?

You create a Facebook group and post in it everyday.

You post 5 to 10 times a day on Instagram and Tik Tok, sign up for the latest webinar software, redo our branding, run Facebook ads, Instagram ads, YouTube ads, Google ads, Tik Tok ads & even Pinterest ads (yes that is a real thing!)

And it’s not to say that these don’t work - they all work, that’s the problem. You get FOMO if you’re not across all of it, feeling like you’re missing out on what your competitors are taking advantage of.

But you have to pick your battles, you simply can’t win them all - there isn’t enough time in a day.

I’ve seen people drive themselves crazy trying to keep up with the content machine. Day in, day out, week in, week out; until they fall out of love with their business, because they didn’t want to be a full time content creator, they wanted to help clients to achieve success.

My advice to you - when you are looking at an opportunity, ask yourself, “is this a step towards my end goal, is this a side step, or is this taking me backwards”, and if it isn’t driving you forwards, maybe it isn’t for you

Have you ever looked at the best people in your field and the best people in the world at their chosen craft and noticed that they built their success in one specific key area?

Warren Buffett has dedicated his life to being the best investor in the world, that’s his one thing.

Oprah Winfrey built her success around one thing - her talk show, where she is incredible at shining the light on the achievements of others.

Even Tony Robbins built his success helping people to overcome their fears before moving on to becoming a generalist.

The truth is we only have so much focus; and the ability to focus on one thing for a prolonged period of time is a genuine superpower that 99.99% of people don’t give enough credit to.

If you can create a scalable product or service, provide genuine value to your clients and your market; and continue to provide this over a long period of time without getting distracted by all of the shiny balls that come and go, you will be successful beyond your wildest dreams.

“Don’t become a wandering generality. Be a meaningful specific” - Zig Ziglar

In order to truly make an impact in this world you need to consider your work like an arrow. The sharper the arrow head (the more specific you are) the more of an impact you will make on your target.

Often early on in business you will look to be more of a generalist, to widen your audience, which can make sense in a way. You think, if I target more people and widen my scope, there is more chance that I will get more clients, right? Wrong!

By focusing on specificity, you become world class at solving one specific problem, for one specific person with one specific offer. And you can create a multi-million dollar per year business by following this method, without selling your soul to being busy and giving up your life.

You will become so good at solving the problem for your market that clients will find you and your name will become synonymous with solving that problem - so make sure it’s a worthwhile problem to solve, because you get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of problems that you solve.

And remember…you can have your cake and eat it too - because why would you want cake if you couldn’t eat it?!