“Get better at what you’re doing. Everything else is a complete waste of time.”
– Jerry Seinfeld
A few years back I had a young financial advisor I was coaching get off to a good start. He was in the top 10% of second year people in his entire company and was cracking five figures every month, a great position for someone so new to their business. He was doing the right things to build a highly profitable and sustainable business that would have paid him a quarter million a year before he was thirty. And then he developed SOS: Shiny Object Syndrome.
He got distracted by crypto.
It started as just a passing interest that he checked out. Then he bought some. Then he started trading. Then he tried to convince others about it and took more and more time from building his business and relationships with long term clients to extract short term gains from micro-mispricing of various cryptocurrencies. In six months, he completely abandoned his financial services career to focus on trading, and then some bad stuff happened in the crypto market, and he was wiped out with no fallback plan.
I’m not saying owning some crypto or gold or other esoteric investments is bad. But it was a distraction that ate up his time and took him away from what was important: seeing clients and building relationships and his business.
We’ve all been there. That game on your phone that you start spending more time playing and thinking about when cooking or driving or even working.
That side gig that you took to make a few bucks that is now taking up all your free time.
That interesting idea you decide to checkout on the computer and four hours later you are so far down the rabbit hole and have added nothing to your life or relationships.
Time is the most limited commodity we have and allocating it in a focused manner brings differential long-term results. The guy who dabbles in judo and boxing and karate and flute and guitar will never be as good as the person who does one and commits to it. The specialist makes more money than the generalist, has less distractions, and can ultimately do superior work.
Jim Collins in the book “Good To Great” talks about the hedgehog concept of focusing on a single thing and becoming better and better and better at it. Bruce Lee proclaimed “I do not fear the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” This is what Seinfeld is saying: focused practice is the path to excellence and mastery. It is where the real riches and happiness are to be found.
Everything else is a professional time suck.