Why Your Hard Work Isn’t Producing the Success You Expect

When Nike named Mark Parker its CEO in 2006, one of the first things Parker did was call Apple CEO Steve Jobs for advice. At the time, Nike was trying to fit its digital strategy into its line of hundreds of thousands of products.

Steve Jobs said one thing that stuck with Parker:

“Nike makes some of the best products in the world. Products that you lust after. But you also make a lot of crap. Just get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff.”

“He was absolutely right,” said Parker. “We had to edit.”

So Instead of going into another product line for technology, Nike got rid of the crappy stuff and focused on what it did best as Jobs rightly advised. The result was Nike+, reportedly one of the most successful Nike campaigns ever.

In life, massive success directly results from focusing on the one thing you do best. Until you commit to that particular thing you do better than everyone else as an industry or as a leader, your effort is bound to produce second-class results.

And that leads us to the first reason why your effort is probably not yielding the success you expect:

• You are Spreading Yourself too Thin

If you still think multitasking is the secret to productivity, then you have to think again. Because according to science, mono-tasking- not multitasking- is the secret to getting things done.

According to neuroscientists, our brains aren’t built to do more than one thing at a time. And when we try to multitask, we damage our brains in ways that negatively affect our well-being, mental performance, and productivity.

A study from Stanford University also found that people who multitask are more easily distracted, less productive, score lower on tests for recalling information, and make more errors.

The cost of trying to do many things simultaneously could damage your perspective, health, and relationships. And at the end downplays the quality of your effort and consequently the outcomes of those efforts.

Learn to work on one task at a time.

— Break your work down into actionable chunks.

— Set a timer for periodic breaks as you work on every single task.

— Take a long break after completing each task before returning to the next.

The result is that you will get more done without suffering burnout while also not compromising other very key areas of your life.

• You’re Trying To Do Many Things Well

Trying to get really good on many fronts is certainly no good advice in business as well as in your personal life.

Focusing on one — at most two major fronts — and going really deep on them is the key to achieving tremendous success for your efforts.

The reason is that you will only become a go-to person in what you are an expert at. People patronize expertise. And focusing on getting good at a few things is the surest way to attaining expert status and thus becoming a go-to person.

Apple and Pixar CEO Steve Jobs had some advice for director Brad Bird when he was making decisions about merchandise on the 2004 movie The Incredibles: “fewer things, better things.”

Focus on doing a few things really well.

If you want to get the level of success that may even surpass the effort you inject into your work, follow the simple advice that saved Nike from disaster:

Stop going after every opportunity. “Get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff.”

Final thoughts

Dear friend, three steps forward and two backward won’t get you the level of success you expect for your handwork.

Harboring self-sabotaging habits downplays the outcome of your effort in no small measure.

If you want your hard work to yield maximally learn to monotask — not multitask; and choose a few over more tasks.

Because as Steve Jobs rightly said, “few is better”. You will produce better quality work and your hard work will yield the success it deserves.