Every high achiever has a powerful team of key staff members, consultants, vendors, and helpers who do the bulk of the work while he or she is free to create new sources of income and new opportunities for success. The world’s greatest philanthropists, athletes, entertainers, professionals, and others also have people who manage projects and handle everyday tasks — enabling them to do more for others, hone their craft, practice their sport, and so on.
The total focus process
To help you clarify what you should be spending your time on and what you should be delegating to others, do the following exercise. Your goal is to find the top one, two, or three activities that best use your core genius, bring you the most money, and produce the greatest level of enjoyment.
1. Start by listing all those activities that occupy your time… whether they’re business-related, personal, or related to your civic organizations or volunteer work. List even small tasks such as returning phone calls, filing, or photocopying.
2. Next, choose from this list those one, two, or three things you are particularly brilliant at, your special and unique talents, those things very few other people can do as well as you. Also choose from this list the three activities that generate the most income for you or your company. Any activities that you are brilliant at and that generate the most income for you or your company are the activities where you’ll want to focus the most time and energy.
3. Finally, create a plan for delegating everything else to other people. Delegating takes time, training, and patience, but over time you can keep chipping away at the low-payoff, nonessential tasks on your list until you are doing less and less of those and more and more of what you are really good at. That is how you create a brilliant career.
* Source: The Success Principles by Jack Canfield