The secret of success is in the quality of your focus. Like a surgeon precisely removes the damaged part, you must replace what is not efficient with something that is. Do not focus on the past except to learn from it. What you do now will determine the success or failure in the future.
Focus on the present to prepare for the future. Focus on the past to learn from your mistakes and successes. Focus on the trends so you can ride them to success. Focus on new developments to take advantage of them. Analyze everything so that you can weed out inefficiencies and keep going at full speed to reach your goals.
One thing often overlooked is that if you keep on doing what you have been doing, you will keep on getting what we have been getting. It is insane to expect different results with the same action. If you are not getting good results, you must change what you are doing. Here is where the precise part comes in. You usually do not have to change everything, just the inefficient part.
The problem is that you probably do not know which part to change. This is what focus is all about. You must develop a method of analysis to determine what is efficient and what is not. Sometimes you simply have to change something and see what happens. It is a matter of discovering what does not blend in with your system. It is a process of elimination to remove what is not efficient.
Success is often a matter of timing. What will work one time, may go belly up another time. Businesses often move gradually to a peak, hold steady for a while and then begin to decline. The same goes for products that businesses sell. They are popular for a while and then decline, depending on their quality and the quality of their competition.
You have to have a feel for what is hot and what is not. You have to know when to get in a business, how it is doing, and how to make it more efficient. You have to know how and when to get out if time changes have outdated your business.
This is where your focus is critical. How well you do, depends on how you read what is going on. You must not only focus on the present, but you must have a gut feeling for which way things are going. This requires analyzing trends. You can get better as you gain more experience. If you are sharp enough to anticipate changes in the trends, you can get a jump on the competition. If you guess wrong, you will lose ground.
How fast you rise to success and how long it remains to a peak, depends on the efficiency of your focus. You must sell what is hot and drop what is not. You must keep up with new developments. New technology may threaten your business unless you see it coming and take advantage of it. If you do not keep up with changes in the times, you will be left behind.