Super U Podcast | The Focus Project Q&A with MWM Design Group
On this episode of the Super U Podcast, Erik sat down with the MWM Design Group to discuss The Focus Project along with several tips and tricks to achieve focus and success. Click here to subscribe to the Super U Podcast. Need a sneak peek? Below are the main takeaways from the episode.
Super U Podcast | The Focus Project Q&A with MWM Design Group:
[6:08] Q&A Preview
Any suggestions on how to deal with fires when we’re trying to focus on the important?
“I mean, and I’ll stress throughout the book is that we don’t live in a vacuum. So you have to deal in reality as well. You’ll want to get, in time, to be fire prevention over firefighting. And again, it takes time to do that. But you’ve also got to assess in the moment. Just pause a little more than you normally would when you run off to solve that issue. As a leader, it might be that someone asks you a question, and your knee-jerk reaction is to give an answer where sometimes the best thing to do is ask the question back to that person. So now you have that insight, and you actually get the insight for that person before you cloud their vision with what your answer would be. That’s just one example.
In terms of the fire analogy, there are some things like a candle, “Hey, I got to put that candle out before I go to bed.” And there’s other things. It’s like, “Oh, my gosh, that wing of the house is on fire. I’ve got to put that out.” So pause and assess what type of fire you’re dealing with. Then also understand, are you the person that should be dealing with it? To use an example, I’ve got a 10-year-old girl, so the candle example is I could go, “Hey, Sophia, can you please go blow out that candle outside?” And maybe the first two times she doesn’t do it. And then I’ve got to teach her overtime. Like, “Hey, can you take that?” So those are the couple of things you want to assess. One, just pause first and foremost, when that fire is there.
Then getting a little deeper in the weeds. I own an animation studio, and so [we’re] very service-based. And I talked about this in the book, is that we were doing with one of our first clients was, “Hey, we want to do this one, do that.” We’re like, “well, you really don’t want to do that for this video, because it’s gonna cause this issue.” They’re like, “No, no, no, we want to do it.” And we didn’t really push back super hard on it. And then with more learning, we realized that “oh, okay, we’ve got to get better at that.” But also, we need to put a system in place. So then we adjusted the system to be: you’re allowed one change to the video. This is unheard of in our animation world we live in, where you get one change. But if you want to buy more change upfront, here’s the cost. If you decide not to buy upfront, it’s an additional cost. It’s a lot higher price once we get into it. And so it took some conviction, it costs us some business, but it makes better projects long term. It actually grew our business, because it’s a little different than how we do it. And most people didn’t want to change, which is our cost… I don’t want to have you go out there, say no to everybody, but just kind of pause a little more than doing our knee-jerk reaction, which is to actually start the solution right away.”
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The Super U Podcast is hosted by #1 bestselling author and Motivational Speaker Erik Qualman.
