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RULE 1:

DON’T FOCUS ON ONE THING

A single point of failure (SPOF) is a system that, “contains only one component to do a job . . . if that single component fails, there is no alternate one to take its place.”

—PC Magazine

Our parents and professors were wrong. Most of them pushed us to focus on one thing and get really good at it. Pick a major. Become an expert. Be the go-to person everyone calls when they need whatever skill you’ve mastered.

That’s fine if you aspire to become, say, the world’s top neurosurgeon. But it’s terrible advice if you actually want to get rich and work less.

I already mentioned one problem with this approach: it gives you a single point of failure. If you put all your trust and resources into one thing, and that one thing fails, you’re screwed. This is true whether you’re talking about a day job, a new business, or anything in which you invest your time and money. You’re forever vulnerable to the competition. Even if you do become the world’s—or your region’s—top neurosurgeon, or marketer, or software engineer, someone can always replace you. It’s just too easy these days for people to move around and get new jobs. Employers can find better talent quicker than ever; customers are constantly trying new ideas and canceling on businesses. Your one thing is always under attack—and so is your livelihood.

I’m sure this sounds familiar. We’ve all been told at some point that we shouldn’t “put all our eggs in one basket.” But what’s the counterstrategy? The cliché fails to tell us that part. If you want to get rich, you need a strategy beyond just keeping your options open. Yes, focus on more than one thing. But you also need to know what projects are worth chasing, how to split up your time, and how to make the ventures you do pursue work for you.

Let’s put strategy aside for a second, though. It helps, but strategy plays a small role in success. The two biggest factors in success are actually timing and luck. (Don’t believe anyone who tries to tell you their success has nothing to do with luck.) You can’t control either of these things outside of setting yourself up to get lucky and positioning yourself at the right time. And the only way to do both is by taking more chances. You may have heard this expressed as “fail more.”

HOW A COLLEGE SIDE PROJECT MADE ME $6,400

There’s also a more subtle reason you won’t win big by focusing on one thing, and it’s potentially the most powerful: it keeps you from ever being able to multiply your income. I’m not talking here about just adding up income streams. Multiplying is when you find the patterns that link different projects and then leverage those connections so each venture makes way more than it could have on its own. Multiplying is the epitome of working smarter, not harder. And it’s what separates the round-the-clock hustlers from the umbrella drink sippers.

Luck and multiplying are the reasons my podcast, The Top Entrepreneurs, has ten million downloads and earns me $50K a month.

When I started the podcast in 2016 all my revenue came from sponsorships. My first sponsor actually reached out to me a few months after the podcast launched:

From: Justine Smith █████████

Date: Wed, Feb 24, 2016 at 10:47 AM

Subject: Podcast Sponsorship?

To: ████████████████

Hi Nathan,

My name is Justine and I represent ██████ the cloud accounting solution for small, service-based business owners with over 5 million users worldwide.

As a full-time business owner, I’m a big fan of your podcast and was wondering if you’d be open to exploring a sponsorship from ██████. We think it would be a great fit on both sides and are eager to learn more about partnering with you.

If yes, I’d love to know:

Thank you,

Justine

This turned into a $6,400 deal to run a software company’s ad on the podcast for two months:

Three months later I signed on my second sponsor, who paid me $5K to feature them on the podcast for thirty-five consecutive episodes.

All of my podcast revenue still comes from sponsors, only now I’ve figured out how to leverage one of my other companies, The Top Inbox, to grow sponsorship income way beyond what the podcast earned on its own. How the magic happens:

The Top Inbox is a Gmail tool that lets you schedule emails to be sent later, set inbox reminders, track opens, and schedule auto follow-ups. When I bought The Top Inbox I had no idea I could put a pop-up on the software’s interface. It’s just something I stumbled on. So I decided to experiment with using pop-ups to drive traffic to my podcast sponsors.

Most of my podcast sponsors are software companies selling productivity, sales, and marketing tools to small and midsize businesses. Turns out, a lot of small business owners use The Top Inbox to stay productive, and they’ve proved to be a prime audience for whatever my podcast sponsors are offering.

THE $180K “POP-UP” ACCIDENT

I started experimenting by using psychological leverage in those pop-up boxes to make The Top Inbox users feel like they’ve won a prize—that is, a free trial of the sponsor’s product. This lets me drive thousands of high-quality clicks very quickly to any sponsor I want. The outcome: my sponsor gets bigger returns and stays onboard as a happy, long-term partner. I ran this pop-up for an email marketing company:

×

Today Only: 50% off ██████ List Building, Marketing Tools

Nathan here, guy behind █████████. I’ve used ███ to help collect opt ins, manage my email marketing and do social sharing on my blog.

Noah, CEO at ███ never runs deals like this. Since it’s a tool I use, and its discounted, I wanted you to have it before he takes it down (today, Black Friday only).

You’ll only see this pop-up once.

See Deal

Sumo got 941 clicks to its page in the two days this promo ran. Happy Sumo. Happy Nathan.

Today, podcast sponsors each pay me $150K to $180K a year, and my Top Inbox pop-ups are driving a lot of that success—something I literally stumbled onto. The opportunity just wouldn’t exist if my podcast, or The Top Inbox, were my only projects. I got totally lucky. Now the ability to cross-promote is a staple I look for when I’m acquiring companies.

Overlap like this exists everywhere. Elon Musk capitalizes on the patterns that link his projects at every turn. At the moment he has ventures in artificial intelligence and neuroscience through his company Neuralink, solar roof tiles via SolarCity, high-speed transportation with Hyperloop, electric cars through Tesla, and rockets with SpaceX.

Each company works independently, but Musk links them whenever he can. His electric car and solar tiles both tie into green energy. Both products use lithium batteries to efficiently store energy. Since he’s generating such huge demand for the batteries, he’s building Gigafactory, a massive plant to service that demand. He’s created multiple products that touch the same resource—lithium ion power—and he’s leveraging economies of scale to bring his costs down.

Multiplying is going to play a huge role in whatever strategies you embrace from the chapters ahead. It’s also the reason that most successful people in the new economy have just an OK understanding of many different things. They get multiple ventures going and then pull out the patterns that link them. If you pigeonhole yourself into one thing, you’ll lose the chance to recognize patterns and capitalize on them to multiply your income streams. I don’t care whether you’re running a business or renting out a room in your apartment. Always have more than one thing brewing, and always look for the patterns that can help your ideas feed off one another.

MY THREE-FOCUS RULE

OK, so you’re not Elon Musk. You’re on chapter 1, so it’s likely you haven’t even launched anything yet. That’s good. You’re much better off because this book will teach you how to maximize your efforts before wasting any time or money.

Don’t let the idea of juggling multiple ventures scare you off just because you’re not working on Musk’s level. It’s even more important for you to focus on a few things when you’re just starting out, regardless of what popular advice tells us.

Often when founders have meetings with investors and advisers, they’re told to “pick an idea and go all in.” This advice goes way back—there’s even a proverb that says, “If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.” The problem with that guidance, at least from a business standpoint, is that it’s only relevant if you’re going for a huge, billion-dollar hit. And you’re not going to do that when you’re just starting out.

The chances of you building a billion-dollar business on your first try are essentially zero. You’d have better luck playing the lottery. You’re much more likely to succeed by taking over or building a $4M or $5M business in a predictable way. And I’m still talking to you if the idea of launching a multimillion-dollar anything sounds out of reach. Everything I’m saying here applies even if you’re running an Etsy store or working an office job.

However you start out, my only rule is that you’re always pursuing three new opportunities at the same time. Once a venture is up and running, you’re going to set it on autopilot so it only takes an hour or two of your time per month. I’ll show you how to do that later. At that point it’s no longer one of your three new projects. It’s just happily humming in the background, calling attention to itself only when you notice the passive income that it pours into your bank account.

It’s fine if whatever you’re doing doesn’t bring in huge money to start. The most important thing for now is that you’re learning to maximize your time, your effort, and your output. If you don’t, you’ll never hit the next level. You’ll never get the win.

The strategy here is similar to what makes a great batter in baseball. The batter who repeatedly gets the win takes multiple swings, hits many balls, and understands how to hit doubles over and over again. He doesn’t step up to the plate planning to hit one grand slam that will win the game. That’s the same person who has the idea they’re working on now, plus two others on the side. Businessperson or batter, they’d never bank on one big hit.

These people know there are good balls flying at them all the time and it’s a given that they’re going to miss some. That’s why the rules of baseball allow three chances to swing at a good pitch. The same goes for your business ventures. Sometimes you’ll miss those good balls because you’re not looking; or you’ll have other life emergencies that keep you from calculating that perfect swing.

It’s OK to miss, but it’s important that you actually swing at those good balls. You get three, and if you fail to swing at them, it does a lot of bad things. The first and obvious one is that it decreases your chance of having three different income streams. As in baseball, an umpire is going to call a strike if you sit there and watch a good opportunity fly by. That’s like letting a $5K check per month pass you by. Reach out. Capture it. Make it big or shut it down a few months after you’ve tried and learn from it.

Another big reason it’s so important to swing at those good balls is that when you swing and miss, you get to diagnose why you missed. Any venture you attempt and then shut down accelerates your learning. Swinging at each good opportunity sets you up to learn three times faster than if you’d never tried.

It’s also easy to forget that some of the biggest success stories involve a lot of luck. The luck may have been random, but the people behind those successes set themselves up to capture that luck—and that was intentional. It’s well documented that Thomas Edison ran thousands of experiments not knowing which would work. When some things did work, he wouldn’t always know why they worked. I consider that luck. From there, he had to figure out why he got lucky. If atom one hit atom two in a certain way that made the lightbulb work, he would reverse engineer the process to figure out why it succeeded and then replicate it. We see only the working lightbulb at the end, but that success was the result of literally thousands of chances to win that Edison set up for himself.

Many people don’t want to admit that their wealth was a result of luck. They like to say they saw the big win coming from the start. But in a lot of cases, that’s just not true. Luck played a major role. Chasing three opportunities at once is a big way to set yourself up to get lucky.

MY CALENDAR PATTERNS: THREE PROJECTS AT ONCE DOESN’T = THREE TIMES THE WORK

On this page I talk about batching time, a strategy many successful people use to tackle huge projects. My three biggest projects at the time of this writing are my Top Entrepreneurs podcast, The Top Inbox, and GetLatka.com. Looking at my schedule this week you can see how I batch: 10 percent is The Top Inbox related, 20 percent are podcast interviews, 40 percent are GetLatka.com sales calls, and 50 percent are miscellaneous. These projects are all well established now, but as I worked on launching each one I focused most of my time on building the infrastructure that would make each project print money. I’ll show you how I did that for each one in the chapters ahead. My schedule varies each week depending on where I need to drive revenue.

Remember, I said the most important thing to focus on right now is learning to maximize your time, your effort, and your output. So my Three-Focus Rule is not meant to send you on a crazy multitasking stint that will burn you out. That’s exactly what I want to help you avoid. To make the Three-Focus Rule work, you’re going to leverage the 80/20 rule when pursuing new opportunities.

You won’t have time to work on three huge, time-consuming projects at once. So focus 80 percent of your time on one project—the one that brings in the most money or that has the potential to be your biggest earner. Split the other 20 percent of your time between the two remaining ventures. That may mean launching them on a smaller scale or putting them on a slower schedule. Or choose ventures that are inherently more passive for the 20 percent of time you have left: invest in another business rather than starting your own, build a new income stream off one of your projects already on autopilot, etc.

When you break up a five-day workweek, this means you want to spend about three days a week on the 80 percent idea. That could be a software start-up, consulting, hunting for real estate (see chapter 8)—whatever you want. It could even be your full-time job while you’re building up savings so you can quit to focus on growing one of your other two ventures. Just don’t try to launch three huge new projects from scratch. You’ll likely fail at all of them and kill your spirit in the process.

The last reason I’m obsessed with the Three-Focus Rule touches on everything I’ve said so far: it lets you test ideas (swing, miss, learn), multiply them (find and capitalize on the patterns), and then use that knowledge to launch brand-new ventures.

Your current businesses are loaded with potential for new income. Sometimes it’s built into what you’re already doing, like realizing you can use scrap leather from your handbag business to make keychains and bracelets. Other times new money comes from just talking to your customers and figuring out what else they might want that you can offer.

I own rental units in Blacksburg, Virginia, that generate cash flow for me. I constantly talk to my renters to understand why they’re paying rent and how they think about rent.

At the same time, I’m an investor in a hostel where I live in Austin, Texas. One thing I’m betting on is that as we move into the next four or five years, people are going to hate the idea of paying rent. They’ll much rather pay a monthly subscription fee to live anywhere they want in the world. If I want to tap into that demand, I’ll have to own hostels in multiple cities around the world. People will pay me one fee of, say, $1K per month and they can choose to stay in whichever one of my properties they want, whenever they want. They’ll have location freedom.

I can test out that concept on my tenants who are paying a fixed rent. All I have to do is ask them, “Hey, if I allowed you to live anywhere you wanted, you’d pay the same rent, you’d have total location freedom, would you do it?” If it works out, I’ll be leveraging two separate ideas—investing in hostels versus investing in real estate—to launch an entirely new venture.

Then the multiplying can continue. Let’s say I launch a book after my hostel idea is off the ground. What if I worked with the hostels to put a book on every bed? That could be a great distribution channel.

Elon Musk used this exact strategy to launch Gigafactory. The plant exists only because his other businesses generated the demand for lithium ion batteries. Ideas beget ideas like money leads to more money. None of us have gotten rich by sticking to one thing.

So forget the old advice.

Test your luck.

Open your odds to good timing.

Ditch what’s not working and learn from it.

Or stick to one thing and risk losing everything.