Business Marketing Magazine Summer 2017 December 2015 The best of 2015 | Page 33

master builder, created long before the construction of a most magnificent mansion, or
any other construction project – including
the 10’ x 10’ deck in your backyard. Every
detail is thought of in advance, right down
to the location of electrical outlets and
switch plates. The creation of this master
blueprint is not an easy or a quick endeavor.
Plan to dedicate many hours to this process,
for it cannot be finalized in an evening or a
weekend.
To be complete, the end result of the Habit
2 portion of Clarity will be defining your
purpose, or the ‘why’ of the things you want
to accomplish. Close to the why are the
values that will direct your decisions as you
identify strategic objectives. We’re talking
about your core values, and often these are
not necessarily easy to identify – but they
will be a tremendous help once you’re introduced to frustrations, interruptions and
obstacles.

create the proper focus is:

1. Mandating the correct action items…

2. Creating the detail to support the actions…
3. Creating benchmarks that can measure
results…
Being focused reminds me of a story I heard
years ago about an extremely busy farmer
who got so distracted that he never really
accomplished anything. You see, he was in
the field working on a fence after dinner,
when he noticed that he needed a particular
tool, thinking it was in the truck he walked
back to the truck but couldn’t quickly find
it, so he took a few moments to organize the
truck to make sure the tool wasn’t there.

Once done with that task he drove back to
the barn to get the tool from the tool room.
Unfortunately, as he opened the barn door
he realized that it was sagging, so he left the
barn door open and proceeded to the tool
Now that the Habit 2 portion is well under- room, which by the way was as cluttered as
way it is time to concentrate on the Habit 3 his truck, but he found a hinge and screws
portion – Putting First Things First. Once
to fix the barn door and proceeded to take
the blueprint is prepared, it serves as a map care of that issue. Once done he returned
to hourly, daily, weekly monthly and yearly
to the tool room and was unable to find the
activities. Now the task at hand is to make
tool he needed for the fence project – being
the main things, the main things. It is much sure that the tool was there, he organized
easier to put first things first at this point.
the tool room for the next hour and still
Your clarity is actually the byproduct of the couldn’t find the fence tool. Frustrated – it
implementation of Habit’s 2 and 3. Which is was now time to feed the animals, so off he
the perfect lead into FOCUS the second ‘best went on that task. Once completed he refriend’ of success.
turned to the barn, by now it’s getting dark
so he attempted to turn on the lights, only
to discover that the bulbs were out in the
corner of the barn where he was now sure
he’d left the tool to fix the fence. On the way
to the garage to get the bulbs for the barn,
The ability to stay on task and keep the
he realized that his wife’s car had a flat tire,
main thing the main thing! The strategy to
so he changed the tire (luckily the spare

Focus