Stick To What You Are Good At

My biggest problem is having to turn down a lot of great looking opportunities. The opportunities that come to meet you without you struggling for them and all they require are just some of your time and you doing a couple of easy things outside your area of competence. I am constantly meeting with such opportunities and until last year I was always taking advantage of the ones I could. 

Now I look back and evaluate everything. Yes, they did make me money. One even made me more than my salary in 5 days. So that month I took a week leave and earned that money and still got my salary. But when I aggregate what those opportunities have turned to for me and what my focusing on my core competence have turned for me, I see clearly that they were too random, far-spaced and energy zapping as I have to learn and build from scratch something I wasn't extremely good at. Unlike in my core competence, where I have a very high effort-to-result ratio. Everything I do in my core area of expertise is never from scratch, I am constantly building on things I have done before. I could crank out more output in a hour than some people would in one week, because I have a huge library of re-usable resources. Resources I have painstakingly built over the years doing jobs for all types of clients.

One advice I now give myself and follow is: stick to what you are good at. I now see myself as an artist, someone obsessed with creative design and my special work. Like a full-time novelist, a full-time sculptor, a painter or a full-time programmer. They pour themselves into their chosen specialty and leave other fields to other people. They don't try to do what someone else is doing in another field. They stick to what they are good at. They create the novels we can't put down till we read to the end. They create the work of arts we admire and love to own. They create the programs and applications that are changing the world and the way we do things. They create because that's what they are good at and they've stuck to it.

image: twitter.com

I am fortunate to be good at creating too. I create written content, video training content and programs. There is little competition in my specialty and niche location (Lagos, Nigeria). People say I write better than I talk. That I look smarter in words than in person. So I'll be sticking to what I am good at. My analysis shows that it has the most return on time and resources invested. And it comes with the added advantage of becoming a genius at something with lots of great works to point at.