{"id":1309,"date":"2015-03-21T00:48:38","date_gmt":"2015-03-21T04:48:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beingbobblog.com\/?p=1309"},"modified":"2015-03-24T08:37:40","modified_gmt":"2015-03-24T12:37:40","slug":"to-be-successful-do-only-what-you-do-best","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beingbobblog.com\/happy-holidays\/to-be-successful-do-only-what-you-do-best\/","title":{"rendered":"To Be Successful, Do Only What You Do Best"},"content":{"rendered":"

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If there were some way for you to download decades of my experience in the business world and sort through the individuals who\u00c2\u00a0have had great success bringing real products to market, you\u2019d find something very interesting.<\/p>\n

You\u2019d find a lot of very competent, talented, smart, ingenious, driven people who\u00c2\u00a0work very hard at their jobs. And the one thing they care about most is helping to deliver groundbreaking products and services that customers prefer over the competition.<\/p>\n

One more thing they\u2019d all have in common: a specific area of functional expertise. Whether it\u2019s product development, operations, marketing, finance, or an entire market, there is always one thing they do best. The same is true of nearly every successful entrepreneur you\u2019ve ever heard of:<\/p>\n

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is a coder. So is Google CEO Larry Page. So was Bill Gates.<\/p>\n

Before and after cofounding PayPal, Peter Thiel ran hedge funds. Sure, he has a law degree, but like Warren Buffett and Charles Schwab, his expertise is in investing.<\/p>\n

Steve Jobs was more of a marketing genius. Likewise, Starbucks founder Howard Schultz has a head for marketing.<\/p>\n

Apple\u2019s current CEO Tim Cook is an operations guy.<\/p>\n

Whole Foods founding CEO John Mackey has always been into food, especially healthy food.<\/p>\n

As for Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, as far back as high school he was all about software.<\/p>\n

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I started out in engineering but migrated to marketing. Although I\u2019m now a business consultant and writer, I\u2019m still a marketing guy. That\u2019s what I do best.<\/p>\n

I could go on but I\u2019m sure you get the point. Everyone starts out doing something and some of us end up running the whole show, but somewhere in between, successful people always find the one thing<\/em>they do best. And that becomes a pivotal point in our careers.<\/p>\n

While I\u2019m tempted to say that once you find it, you pretty much know, I can\u2019t say that for sure. It was true for me and of everyone else I\u2019ve ever asked about it, but I\u2019m sure some only know in hindsight, long after the fact.<\/p>\n

Still, there is a catch. As far as I know, this is true only of highly driven people. I suspect the reason is they make it their mission in life to find a place where their talents can shine and they can make their mark on the world. They search until they find it. That pursuit speaks to their motivation, focus, discipline, and work ethic.<\/p>\n

If you have those qualities, I believe you will find what you\u2019re looking for. Sooner or later, I think we all do. But one thing\u2019s for sure. That one thing<\/em> is always a market or functional expertise. If not, then by definition it\u2019s not marketable and you won\u2019t be successful, at least not from a business standpoint.<\/p>\n

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Of course, your one thing could be some sort of humanitarian cause. It doesn\u2019t have to be a moneymaker. But make no mistake, if you want to be successful in business, you have to find that one thing you do best.<\/p>\n

Speaking of which, one article making the rounds makes the ridiculous claim that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153entrepreneurs are generalists.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d There are two problems with that. First, the single European study it references was actually a student survey. It involved no entrepreneurs. Not one.<\/p>\n

Second, the authors of the study<\/em>, although it actually hurts for me to call it that, wrote, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 mere computer nerds are not likely to become entrepreneurs \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Really? Could they be more wrong? What about Gates, Wozniak, Page, Zuckerberg, and hundreds of other geeks who\u00c2\u00a0founded great companies?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s actually as good an example as any to provide a word of caution. The Internet is literally littered with fads, pseudoscience, BS claims, ludicrous surveys, and content mills that will sell their souls for some clicks and eyeballs. Getting into that sort of thing does not count as an expertise. Not even close.<\/p>\n

Truth is, if real entrepreneurs wasted their precious time on all that online nonsense instead of focusing on finding and developing the one thing they do best, there would be no Microsoft, Apple, Google, or Facebook. There would be no Silicon Valley. And there would be a lot fewer successful entrepreneurs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Image credit: REUTERS | Francois Lenoir If there were some<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,8],"tags":[909,912],"class_list":["post-1309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-posts-comments","category-stuff","tag-silicon-valley","tag-whole-foods"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","featured_image_urls":{"full":"","thumbnail":"","medium":"","medium_large":"","large":"","1536x1536":"","2048x2048":"","chromenews-featured":"","chromenews-large":"","chromenews-medium":""},"author_info":{"display_name":"Being BOB","author_link":"https:\/\/beingbobblog.com\/happy-holidays\/author\/admin\/"},"category_info":"All Posts & Comments<\/a> Stuff<\/a>","tag_info":"Stuff","comment_count":"0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p822aG-l7","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beingbobblog.com\/happy-holidays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beingbobblog.com\/happy-holidays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beingbobblog.com\/happy-holidays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beingbobblog.com\/happy-holidays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beingbobblog.com\/happy-holidays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/beingbobblog.com\/happy-holidays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1309\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beingbobblog.com\/happy-holidays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beingbobblog.com\/happy-holidays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beingbobblog.com\/happy-holidays\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}