Focus and Persistence

For us at Chorus One, the biggest challenge in building the company has been to focus. Most of the time, we have been doing many things. Exploring ideas. Launching new initiatives.

There are many reasons for this:

• We hire many smart people. They are creative and ambitious and want to pursue new things.
• It's more intellectually exciting to explore new ideas rather than to improve what you have.
• We often had doubts about the strength of our business. We would look for new ideas that seemed to give rise to better businesses.
• We have not been clear enough in articulating our mission and vision. And where the company is going. That makes it harder to assess, whether new ideas should be pursued or not.
• It's relatively easy to explore a new idea and come up with a great plan. But it's very hard to build an organization that can actually bring that into reality and create something that has a big impact. We have continually overestimated our ability to execute on many ideas in parallel and underestimated the difficulty of doing so.

To create something great takes a long time. It takes a lot of persistence and endurance. Sometimes, it seems boring. Moving to the next thing is always tempting. And sometimes moving on makes sense. But very often, it's better to focus and stick with it. To be patient, to persist and to find joy in many small improvements. In time, they add up.