Focus: Lessons from Liam Neeson and Chess for your Entrepreneurial Journey

In the movie Taken. Liam Neeson's character, brian Mills, is a retired CIA operative who's forced to go on a mission to rescue his daughter, kim, who has been kidnapped. Here's a spoiler alert if you're 15 years late and watching the movie. I don't really like to get into violence at all in this podcast, but there's a singular, perfect metaphor contained in a specific scene from the end that I absolutely have to use. Brian Mills finally gets through all the bad guys and gets to the big boss. Bad guy walks into his office and sees his daughter. Big Boss Bad Guy stands up to say something or to negotiate and Brian Mills shoots him dead before he has a chance to even talk. It made absolute sense to me and it was exciting to see a scene that didn't use movie or drama cliches but, more importantly, it showed the power of Mills' singular focus. He didn't care who or how or why anything was happening. He saw his daughter and was focused on getting her back. The whole movie goes over this. In all the fighting that he did, he wasn't doing it for revenge or to harm anyone or to prove to them how amazing he is. It went back to that one singular focus getting his daughter back. Skip the drama, skip the posing, skip the posturing, skip the acting if you'll allow me that awkwardness acting and just get his daughter back as entrepreneurs and business owners. It's good to skip the drama, to stop trying to prove anything to anyone and just do what it takes to get the job done. Now, I saw the movie a long time ago and I thought the end was cool. I did notice Neeson's singular focus, but I applied it only to the movie. I thought it's really cool that they did that in a movie, because the bad guy usually gets to talk and negotiate and allow some buffer time to try to get out of the mess, and this ends up making things harder for the protagonist, as bad guys usually do. This was entirely different, but I only applied it to the movie. I didn't see it back then as a lesson in my life. After I dove into this whole personal growth mode in 2019, I began digging into the game of chess to see if I could improve my skill. That was one of my goals and I decided to jump on it. The chess lessons I took were helpful. In fact, my chess rating jumped from 650 to 1150 in a matter of a year. I used the chesscom app and took all of the lessons from the very beginning. But one thing that sticks with me is this chess rush game that the app has, where you're given a chess puzzle and your objective is to make the best move on the board. At the beginners level, the best move on the board was less than three moves away every time from checkmate, when I realized, as I played the game, how I could use that entire strategy to improve my life, because as the puzzles progressed, I would look at the board and start analyzing pretty quickly what the best move was. It was a singular focus to bring about checkmate. No posturing, no trying to make impressive moves, no attempt to create unnecessary traps of the queen or traps of other pieces on the board, but to do the best thing that I could do to go after the singular objective of putting my opponent's king in checkmate. I applied both of these lessons to my life by making a list of the most important things that I wanted. So I divided my goals into different categories. I used health, relationships, impact resources, lifestyle and personal development those six things, and those are still the six things that I use even today and I set to work making the goals under each of those categories, a singular focus. I broke the goals down into daily steps and daily disciplines, so habits and steps, the tasks that I need to accomplish. Then I planned each task and discipline to figure out where they would fit in my day and I began to execute the plan, and my life has never been the same. That singular focus on the goals I decided I must have in this life has caused me to take steps every day for the last four years and my life looks nothing like it did in 2019. And more than I could have hoped for a great career where I get to choose when I work and how long I work, a cash flowing real estate portfolio that now makes more money than my marketing consultation business. I have improved relationships, and so much more. I want to help you, through this podcast, get focused on the most important things, and I say all of this because I'm thinking out a new direction with my show and my second mixed business. I've been taking courses, classes, attending mastermind groups, and the current wisdom is that I have to niche down and find a focus and a specific audience, and I believe that I'm going to really start digging down into how to focus, using goal setting, breaking down those goals into steps and planning out how to execute those steps. That's one of the hardest things to do, and actually, when you really get into it, it takes a long time. It's not like this easy thing where you sit down, write your goals down in 10 minutes and you're done. This took me 30 or 40 hours and to upkeep my goals and to ask myself further what I want from life. This is a thing that keeps evolving, it keeps changing, but it keeps getting better. It gets better, and I go after bigger and bigger goals. One of my favorite groups that I'm involved in right now is Vincent Pugliese's mastermind, and I will actually put a link to his podcast, total Life Freedom, in the links in the description here so that you can check that out, because that is absolutely worth it. But I'm working with Vincent on figuring out what my niche is, and I think that I've found it. So the one I'm heading toward is goal setting and mindset for entrepreneurs and small business owners. I'm going to continue to provide the same type of content that I have been, but now there's a more focused direction. I would love to hear your thoughts and opinions, though, so shoot me an email at matt, at secondmixnet. I don't hear enough from my audience and I would love to communicate with you all more. Let me know what you're going through. Let me know the struggles you're having. I know the goal setting is difficult because there is no right or wrong answer. You are ultimately the judge, jury and executioner over what you want your life to be. You get to decide. That's a hard thing, but it's also a beautiful thing. You get to decide how you're going to sculpt your life. So for right now, the most important question that you can ask yourself is what do I want most out of life? What do I have to do to get it and what do I have to become to get it? Then make that your singular focus and cause it to happen in your life. All right, send me an email. I will see you soon.