In an Entrepreneur article, “Want to Be Successful? Focus on One Business,” CEO Tim Cook revealed a guiding principle that Steve Jobs instilled at Apple: the need to stay focused on doing only what you do best.

“It’s easy to add ... it’s hard to stay focused,” Jobs said during a Charlie Rose interview. “And so the hardest decisions we make are all the things not to work on.”

Jobs told a Fortune reporter, “People think focus means saying ‘yes’ to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying ‘no’ to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.”

In the graphic arts, there’s a fundamental principle for laying out photos – always pick the photo with the greatest impact and magnetism, and make it bigger than the rest, to show the readers where you want them to look first. It’s a surprisingly useful rule – in life and in everything we do.

Same for running a business. When you’re focused on your strengths you’ll automatically be building a magnetic brand. There’s just one important caveat: your strengths absolutely must have a strong appeal for your customers.

The “big photo” of your company – the Big Story – should have a powerful emotional impact. And as our RO columnists are forever reminding us, the greatest impact occurs when we put our customers first.

There’s a reason why wise teachers have always emphasized the need for kindness and compassion – it’s not just because it’s a hard-wired rule, but because it leads to the greatest happiness and success for everyone, including us.

If you can tell stories about the wonderful ways you’ve connected with your customers, and how you’ve put yourself in their shoes with kindness and compassion, you’ll be amazed by how your Web visitors will be moved, and how they’ll spread the word and send new customers your way.

Let’s learn to say “yes” to our customers and “no” to anything that gets in the way. Let’s build high-impact customer-service magnetism – and tell the Big Story first.

Here’s to staying focused for success,
Eliana Barriga
​eliana@retailobserver.com

July gives us a chance to contemplate what freedom means. Give me some elbow room, because I’m going to suggest a startling framework for our discussion – I propose that we take Star Trek: Next Generation as our guide.

Happiness and freedom, so the world’s wisdom teachings tell us, increase when we apply our bodies, hearts, will, minds, and souls expansively, with a growing awareness of other people’s needs. It strikes me that the Star Trek characters embody those five “tools of expansion” in ways that are relevant to our success.

Geordi is the body. He cares for the physical plant and makes the ship go. His blindness symbolizes the fact that without the higher faculties of feeling, will, and mind, the body is just a lump, incapable of initiating action.

Deanna Troi is feeling. Calm feeling, not reason and logic, is the faculty that enables us to tell right from wrong. When Picard needs to know the thoughts of an alien race, he turns to Troi who applies her heart’s intuition. Nor is Troi ever in doubt about the rightness or wrongness of a course of action that Picard proposes.

Worf is will power – obvious! Worf can go two ways. When he’s swayed by raw emotion, his decisions are unwise, but if he follows the calm, intuitive voice of Picard, his power gets channeled positively.

Data is the rational mind–capable of impressive computational feats, he’s lost when it comes to relating to humans through intuitive feeling.

Picard is the integrated human being: a leader of strength, refined feeling, volition, and wisdom who uncompromisingly lets himself be guided by impersonal truth.

Consider starting a business. The first stage is the body: finding space, ordering product, setting up systems. Once the physical plant is running, we pour our hearts into making the business go, while facing challenges to our will and intelligence along the way. If the business succeeds, it can serve as an incubator for others to develop their own happiness tools.

Join me, business Trekkies, as we celebrate the pursuit of freedom and success.

Happy Fourth of July,
Eliana Barriga
eliana@retailobserver.com