By: Douglas J Utberg

Most of us have been in a situation where there were lots of things to do, but not much time to do them it.  In these situations, the natural response is to ask what items are the most important . . . and a disturbingly large number of managers and bosses will frequently reply: “It’s all important.”

The subtle insanity of the statement: “It’s all important” is that if everything is considered to be ‘important’ then there is no way to prioritize which activities to do first.  Thus, saying that everything is important really means that nothing is important.

Conversely, if we want to really ‘focus’ on something, we must implicitly decide to eliminate other activities so that we can develop mastery in a specific area instead of consistently dabbling, without building any depth.  This insight is especially important in our current era of marketing bombardment and ubiquitous connectivity, since it is very easy to get distracted by instant messages, emails, and phone calls.

Unfortunately, general knowledge and dabbling doesn’t tend to produce very desirable results.  The rewards available to people who are only ‘average’ have been declining for quite some time, and will continue to decline for quite some time.  The reason for this is because there are a lot of people with ‘average’ skills and abilities.  Because of this, clients and employers do not have an incentive to deliver a high amount of compensation since average talent is very easy to replace at a reasonable cost.

Increasingly, it is only the top performers in most professions that are highly successful.  In order to reach the top of your profession, it requires intensive determination focused on specific goals.  Achieving this focus necessarily requires us to delay or eliminate other activities that we are currently engaged in.  The fundamental question each of us must answer is whether I am willing to make the choice?