With one eye closed everything looks flat.
Only the size of objects lets you know how far away things are.
You lose the rich information that comes from binocular vision.

Driving with one eye closed kills your depth perception.

The combination of parallax, perspective and binocular vision gives you a richness to your vision that lets you assess how far away things are, how fast they’re moving relative to each other, and to pay attention to what really matters.

Some businesses operate every day with one eye closed.

Many organisations dive straight into How.

• How can we increase sales?
• How can we improve customer service?
• How can we increase velocity in our business?
• How can we manage growth?
• How can we better develop our team?
• How can we make smarter hiring decisions?
• How can we prolong our assets?

Too often they neglect the power of What.

• What drives us as a business?
• What business are we really in?
• What are we working to achieve?
• What allows us to make money faster?
• What’s our economic engine?
• What really motivates our people?

“What” questions often get at the heart of the enterprise, allowing you to consider new perspectives and assess underlying needs. Unless you constantly revisit the answers to the What questions as your touchstone, the How answers can take you further and further away from what makes your business unique.

How questions are easy to generate. They’re often reactive and reflect an incomplete picture of the business (and this is becomes even clearer in larger businesses). What questions let you set a direction and identify the causes and effects. How questions keep you trapped within your bubble of assumptions, confusing

We really need to blend the vision of both strategy eyes.

Together, What and How questions let you determine resource allocation with a complete picture of strategy. In fact, you need to decide what before you can determine how. So many elements of your business look different with a different “What“.

• Are you focused on a particular technology, and what can be done with it?
• Are you focused on the peculiar market needs of a niche, like startup watchers?
• Are you focused on sheer returns, and set your strategy accordingly?

Once you’ve determined the What you can look at the How in more detail.

Next time you try driving with one eye closed…

Remember, there is a much richer view available to you when you drive with both eyes open.
It’s safer, smarter, and will get you to your destination alive!

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If your career were a game of Trivial Pursuit, would you prefer it if the game was won by collecting pieces that are all of the same colour, or collecting pieces of different colours?

These are the options, and getting caught in the middle only hurts.

Focus

Adopting a strategy of focus can yield great benefits. The division of labour, academic and other forms of specialisation, and the opportunity to be the best in your world only come about through the persistent and dogged pursuit of this approach.

Aim to master your field. Get to know your peers and rise to the top of the pile.

Place a bet and follow through.

(Oh, and know when to quit.)

Diversification

For many, whether by reason of accident or intent, diversification is their playground. Acquiring and integrating multiple skill sets, industries, or other fields of endeavour is a natural way of developing.

It’s one thing to have mastery of a field. It’s another to have sufficient knowledge to be able to use that mastery in multiple ways to enhance your career, develop clients, or multiply your knowledge.

Approach life with an open mind. Look for the learning opportunity in everything.

Strive to create connections between seemingly disparate endeavours.

(Oh, and know when to seek out a true expert.)

A third way?

What do you see as the third way? How do you approach this challenge?

In fact, I’m going to have to go overweight in order to stop being overweight.
That sounds odd, I know. But the answer is the fund managers’ definition of overweight, not the health practitioners’. In order to get returns superior to the market I need to allocate my resources (capital, time, energy) in the most attractive areas (activities).

I need to eat better and exercise more. I need to invest in activities and ways of thinking that will get me the results that I want, whether they come tomorrow or months from now.

Getting results in business is no different.
If you’re dissatisfied with the results you’re getting in business you may also need to go overweight. To be “out of balance” for a period of time in order to generate the returns you’re after.

Perhaps your customer service isn’t what it could be. Perhaps your marketing could do with an overhaul. Perhaps your cost structure or business model or suppliers need more time and attention than you’ve been giving them in order to generate the returns you want. Or, perhaps they simply need more money spent on them.

Whatever the result you’re chasing, going overweight on the key drivers and contributors to that result is how you’ll succeed.

And that means being overweight is how we achieve superior returns in life, too.
It’s easy to talk about work life balance and to imagine some perfectly balanced day or week, when your boss, spouse, dog, cat, children, or psychotherapist is just as happy with your day as you are. The reality of life is quite different.

In order to get ahead at work you may need to spend more time at the office. You may need to spend time doing the activities that you don’t particularly like in order to develop your skills. You may have to communicate more or less, stand up in front of an audience or stretch yourself by doing a course.

In order to improve your home life, you may need to spend more time there. It might be time to give more attention to your children, to take a holiday together or to create rituals and traditions for generations to come.

There are at least two ways to be overweight in life.
As much as success in life depends on where you allocate your time, which is often the measure for work life balance, there is another factor we can draw upon, the factor of intensity.

Intensity (both intellectual and emotional) can help you succeed even where time is short. The way you acquire skills, the amount of preparation, effort or zeal you put into a task or conversation can help you generate returns where others cannot.

Balance is meaningless until you know what you want to achieve.
For the fund manager it’s easy: they want to outperform the market. They will allocate their capital in whatever classes of investment or particular stocks they believe will deliver superior returns.

For businesses it’s pretty straightforward, too. Having a benchmark or current standard can help you identify where you need to improve.

Having goals makes going overweight worthwhile.
Whilst some fund managers may be content with beating an index or a model portfolio, others will nominate the amount by which they want to beat the index.

In your business or in your home life there’s not an index to beat. Instead you need to create your own benchmark for what you want to achieve. Whether it’s income, or relationships, or even losing weight, deciding what time and intensity you give to tasks and activities in your life will, in a very explicit way, determine where you are overweight.

Get started in going overweight.
Here’s the simple plan:

• Pick an area of your business or life you want to change
• Set a goal that inspires you and will make a real difference (ie its a Priority 1 or 2)
• Break that goal down into tasks/activities you need to complete
• Look at your ‘portfolio’ of current activities and prioritise your Time and Intensity “budgets” against those activities
• Monitor and reassess over time

Where do you need to go overweight in order to get results?