BSOs
Bright Shiny Objects (or BSOs) are the little things that glitter in your path as you move along in life or in building your business.
Things might be going relatively well, but a BSO will distract you from what’s working, and pull you off the path to something that looks enticing but is really just a distraction.
Focus is your capacity to ignore these distractions and in many ways it is your key to success. Although there are other traits that are also essential to your success, I truly believe that focus is the driving force of them all.
Unfortunately, it isn’t always obvious how truly essential focus is to your success.
When You Lack Focus
What becomes obvious is what happens when you lack focus.
- You’re distracted from essential tasks.
- You become unproductive.
- You don’t get things done that need to be done.
- You start feeling frustrated.
- You begin to believe that you can’t reach your goals.
- Or you stop setting goals altogether, or at best you set simple goals that are easy to reach and not the “stretch goals” that can truly change your life.
Worst of all, the BSOs that contribute to your lack of focus cause you to feel unworthy of success altogether because you think that you aren’t capable of performing up to your capability.
It isn’t that you aren’t capable, and it isn’t that you’re trying to do too many things; it’s that you’re trying to do too many things at the wrong time.
You see, you are indeed capable of doing multiple things, but usually not at the same time unless they’re trivial tasks. If you try to do multiple important tasks at the same time, none of them will get done well.
Chase two rabbits… both will escape.
Follow One Course
But that happens all the time when you are building a business online. You start to do one thing and someone suggests something else you should do. You end up adding it to an ever-growing list of things to do and you never get a chance to get good at any of them.
It’s much more important to follow one course of action until you have time to get good at it, so you can evaluate it’s worth properly before you try something else. Some people say that FOCUS actually stands for Follow One Course Until Successful.
Why Are You Procrastinating?
One reason that chasing BSOs is detrimental to your success is that it’s a common symptom of procrastination. You might actually be trying to sabotage yourself by procrastinating on a task because you secretly have a fear of success.
Hardly anyone ever admits to a fear of success, but it’s very, very common.
You might fear success because you don’t want to leave your comfort zone. You’ve lived your entire life doing things a certain way, with a certain income, a certain set of friends, your family has adapted to the lifestyle you’ve allowed them to become accustomed to, etc.
Getting out of that comfort zone exposes you to unknown results, so rather than focus on doing what it takes to change, you let yourself be distracted, delaying the task that you should be working on.
So you don’t change, and you’re comfortable… but you’ve sabotaged your personal progress.
Fear of success is much more powerful that a fear of failure because most people aren’t even aware that they have this fear, and will resist being accused of it. You can’t begin to change a habit that you’re unaware that you have.
Awareness is indeed half (or more) of the battle.
There was an old Pogo comic strip, which is quite likely well before your time, which included a famous and appropriate quote: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Learn to be aware of who the enemy is, and root him out of your mindset.
What To Do Or Learn?
Here’s another exercise that will hopefully convince you of the power of focus…
What is there that you’ve been wanting to do, or wanting to learn, for years?
Let’s say that you wanted to learn how to use WordPress so you could manage your own website for yourself.
But right now you’re scared to death of anything that involves ‘technical stuff’, and you resist doing things that require it, even though it would be great for your business.
So you keep going along your merry way doing other things besides learning WordPress, and your website either doesn’t exist or is embarrassingly out of date.
How long do you actually think it would take to become proficient and comfortable with WordPress? – if you really sat down and focused on it, ignoring everything else for as long as necessary?
I figure it would take one or two days, maybe three at the very most.
You just have to do it.
Make the time in your diary when you focus on just that and nothing else, and it may even take less time. Turn off your phone, avoid all the socials and just focus.
Check out our Crash Course on WordPress For Every Day People if that’s what you have been meaning to focus on but haven’t gotten around to yet. https://kmginfo.link/wordpress
What have you always wanted to get good at? A programming language or HMTL or CSS? Running webinars or Google hangouts? Podcasting? Pay per click advertising? It really doesn’t matter. The point is to pick one and focus on it.
It isn’t that you can’t do those things, it’s just that you haven’t focused on learning how to do them yet. Just like building a business you love, you can do it. Get started, focus and then you will get better.
Focus and you’ll be able to achieve much more than you ever thought possible in ridiculously short amounts of time. You can do anything you want to if you focus on it.
What Are Your BSOs?
Did you ever try to keep track of how much time you actually spend each day doing tasks that contribute to your progress, your success, your income?
I’ll bet if you did, you’d be amazed at how much time you’re actually consuming that does nothing to move you forward. You check emails, you chat on Skype, you check your Facebook feed, and you watch all the funny videos. Then you contact someone to share those funny videos with them.
And on and on it goes all day, until you reach the end, and you’re exhausted, and you haven’t accomplished much of anything at all. Your BSOs have eaten up all your time.
That Has To Stop
That has to stop. You have to focus on the task at hand. You need to be accountable to yourself at least, and to an accountability partner such as a coach if you want the ultimate boost. Telling someone you’re going to get something specific accomplished in a given time is a good way to force yourself to actually focus on that task.
As you build that business you love remember the importance of focus each time a BSO tries to distract you from your planned activity. Eventually this will help you to form the habits that will make the art of focusing second nature for you.
But until then, make it a conscious effort to be more focused on single specific tasks during your working day, and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the successful results you achieve.
