Nail Down Your Focus to Actualize An Idea

So I actually did an experiment. So once I discovered that this phone thing was happening, I gave up my laptop and spent the next several months just working off of my phone and an iPad, which in 2010 was an incredibly hard thing to do. I was trying to do PowerPoint on it, Excel on it. There was no native applications, and the form factor was this big. So I did that for several months. It was painful, but I felt like you could do that, right? And so that proved to me that this platform, which was sort of still embryonic, if it was this productive and this sort of portable, that there's a probability that this thing is likely to succeed. The second thing was actually what one of my mentors said, which is, you know, as entrepreneurs, we have this syndrome. He calls it the Yaffo syndrome. The entrepreneur's name is Khan Valreki, and he called it the Yafo syndrome. I don't know if you've read about it, but it's called yet another effing opportunity syndrome, right? And what ends up happening is that when you get an idea and you see its application, see, it can be applied here, it can be applied here, it can be applied here. I can do it this, and if I don't do this, somebody else will do this. And so after a while, you feel like you have to do everything simultaneously. And most great ideas die, not because they're not great ideas, but because you diversify and sort of broaden out very quickly. Professor Byers taught me about crossing the casa, which is about narrow focus and crossing something with a lot of force around it. So once I nailed down this focus on phone, I knew I only wanted to focus on that one thing, because building for it will be so hard that diffusing it will actually bifurcate the team, bifurcate the resource, and bifurcate the energy. So the combination of those two things allowed me to build the conviction to go down that path.