Land ONE at a Time

There’s no better illustration of this principle than an #airport control tower. At one given moment, more than a hundred airplanes might be approaching, taking off, or taxiing around; and all of them are very important, especially if you happen to be on one of them! But for the air traffic controller, only one airplane is wildly important right now—the one that’s landing or taking off at this moment. 

The controller is aware of all the other planes on the radar. She’s keeping track of them, but right now all her talent and expertise is solely focused on one flight. If she doesn’t get that flight on the ground safely and with total excellence, then nothing else she might achieve is really going to matter much. - She lands one airplane at a time. The Wildly Important Goals - WIGs - are like that. They are the goals you must achieve with total excellence beyond the circling priorities of your day to day. 

TO SUCCEED, you must be willing to make the hard choices that separate what is wildly important from all the many other merely important goals on your radar.

Then, you must approach that WIG with focus and diligence until it is delivered as promised, with excellence. That doesn’t mean you abandon all your other important goals. They’re still on your radar, but they don’t require your finest diligence and effort right now. (Still, some of those goals might never be worthy of your finest diligence and effort—some of them never should have taken off in the first place!) 

PEOPLE WHO TRY to push many goals at once usually wind up doing a mediocre job on all of them. You can ignore the principle of focus, but it won’t ignore you. Or you can leverage this principle to achieve your top goals, one at a time, again and again