Are You Losing Focus By Helping Others With Their Dreams?
This post is a direct pull from Brendon Burchard’s article: “Why Achievers Crash & Burn”. Brendon Burchard is one of the most watched personal development trainers in the world. He’s rad, people.
In this article, I found Reason #1 to be particularly relevant as I build my own business via the Nothing Off Limits podcast. Getting distracted is something that I continuously battle. Perhaps you will find value in it as well.
For all 4 reasons why achievers crash & burn, see Brendon’s full article on his website here:
Why do achievers crash and burn so often?
They work so hard to get ahead and then when you get ahead, everything falls apart and you start failing and you’re like, “Why? Am I sabotaging myself? Am I doing something wrong?” Well, sometimes.
I’ve found over and over working with high performers, the top level of Fortune 50 companies, Olympians, major celebrity sort of entrepreneurs that these 4 horsemen come into the achiever’s life and it just punches them out. And if you understand these 4 and you watch out for them, then you can maintain your success longer. But if you get trapped into these 4 things, you’re in trouble.
Here we go:
No. 1 reason achievers start to fail is they start to feel like they have to help everybody. You got some success in your life and all of a sudden, some family and friends come out of the woodwork and they need some help, assistance, money. They have new projects for you, new ideas for you. They want you to help their dreams come true.
And all of a sudden, you start finding yourself spread too thin in helping everybody. The community comes up and they say, “Hey, could you give us some scholarships? Hey, could you fund this non-profit opportunity?”
As you get more success, more people want you to serve and, while that’s a good thing, it also ends up diluting your focus. And now, you’re trying to help everybody because you can.
One of the hard parts about being an achiever is everyone looks to you for help, and because you succeeded, and the only reason you succeeded is because you had a big heart and you had compassion for other people, now you feel like you have to help everybody and you burn out. You get exhausted and you think, “Gosh, I used to be able to really focus” but you lose all that focus helping too many people. So, watch out for that.
Are you currently helping too many people?
Because it’s an issue. There’s a balance. There’s a fine line of serving others versus burning yourself out and if you feel like—on your path to achievement—you are really focused and now you are too dissipated, beware. That’s where you will start to fail.
Because that leads us to the no. 2 reason people start to fail, is they lose focus. Your projects and your mission was this. Now, you succeeded at it and you have other people to manage it or it just runs by itself and now you can go focus on all your other projects of passion and now you are like, “Oh, I’m interested in that. I’m interested in this. I’m interested in this and this.”
And you lose focus not just helping other people but in taking on too many projects of your own that you are excited about. Now you’ve got 50 hobbies. You didn’t have all these hobbies before so you achieved. Now, you’ve lost your focus and you start to lose. So, be very cautious of taking on too many passion projects in a row; take on too many at a same time.
Remember, if you take care of your health, god bless, you’re going to live a long while. Life has a way of giving yourself time to do things; I guess, I should say. Don’t try and smack it all in. Just because now you have success and money doesn’t mean you have to do everything at once. Just because you have some taste of success doesn’t mean now you have this, “Oh, now I have permission to do everything because I succeeded.”
Actually, the reason you succeeded is because you focused narrowly on one thing over a period of time. So, I’m not saying, you can’t do lots of other things now. I’m saying just, do them slow. Like, paste them out. Take on a new project, do well at it. New project, do well at it.
In my own life, in my own career, what I tend to do is I build one brand or one new product or service offering for my audience per year. Just one. Now, when you look at my arc of my career, it looks like, “Well Brendon, he does all these things. He does all these books and all these courses and he is everywhere.”
Really, I was just doing one new thing a year. That was it. And sometimes, like right now, I’m doing things right now that I knew I was going to do 5 years ago but I didn’t try to take it on 5 years ago because I knew that I would lose focus from a project I was working on then.
It’s like right now, I have this whole spreadsheet at home of all these books I want to write. If I started trying to write all of them right now, none of them would get written. One thing at a time, man, that’s what made you successful the first time. That’s what’s going to keep you on the path of success.
Thanks for that, Brendon B. I hope all of you reading got a positive brain jolt too. 🙂