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Finding focus in life

I sat all day with a couple of angel investors in a NYC club yesterday as they listened to the funding presentations of eight entrepreneurs.   Some observations: The investors were all about tough love. They didn’t sugarcoat the truth. The biggest way that they demonstr…
By Seth Barnes
By Seth Barnes
I sat all day with a couple of angel investors in a NYC club yesterday as they listened to the funding presentations of eight entrepreneurs.
 
Some observations:
  1. The investors were all about tough love. They didn’t sugarcoat the truth.
  2. The biggest way that they demonstrated tough love was by helping an entrepreneur see what is important about their business model and what isn’t.
  3. They advised relentless focus on the one thing that the entrepreneur could be best at.
It reminded me of Jesus. Jesus was always asking about priorities and focus. He would say things like,
 
“Do you love me more than these?” and “Let the dead bury the dead.”
 
It made me think, If I had an hour with these guys to review my life and look at focus, what would they say? Would I come away and say, “I need to stop doing some things because they’re tangential to my life’s purpose”?
 
How about you? What will burn up in the big fire at the end of your life? Are you focused?

Comments (6)

  • Oh gosh…. conviction! Where is my focus? Is it really what I should be focused on? Or is God saying, “More, Connie…. go for more.”

  • Okay but I’m curious how you got the opportunity to have this experience. Pretty cool. What part did you play?

  • It is all my fault. I dragged him there to do a deal day in NYC, with some edgy rocking state of the art tech companies. A “deal day” for seed and early stage companies. I wanted Seth to gather some inspiration and insight from this investment of time.

    As I’ve posted on Fitch’s missional blog, Evangelical Christians embarrass me at times, they think they are really working, when they are standing still from my perspective. Their commitment to their “thing” is like my commitment to my petunias, i neither weed them or water them, i just don’t want to be really bothered by them, don’t want to do any real work that makes me sweaty or anything.

    If you’ve played poker with Seth, you can see the gleam of an “all in” person, these startup founders are “all in”. 120 hr weeks, every buck they have, pure naked obsession. Where does this come from? I will tell you that it is actually rarely greed. Most of the time it is about changing the world, or improving it, etc….

    I would tell you that there is no real systematic means of creating this or have accreting the partners that are like this. What Seth has possibly done is created a systemic process of creating and accreting them in one place in the World race…

    Now the discussion is what do they do after that? How do you really launch the “all ins” into the Real. The World Race is a Virtual Environment like a Bschool, or an applied engineering school. Now they have to build a product, either as leaders or as workers “all in” in an “all in” institution.

  • Hmm. That’s something to spend sometime thinking about. I feel like so much of my life is being pulled in opposing directions, and knowing how to choose (or maybe not wanting to) which one to go with.

  • Torufinikeme Christopher

    Human life by creation is designed for focus. The first step in the school of focus is to discover your creation purpose then invest all your capabilities, resouces and all you have and all you can be in the pusuit of that. This is posiive focus and beneficial to humanity.
    I really desired every person dose that then the world ( the human race)will part take of God’s inexhaustable blessings.
    Discovery of PURPOSE and it’s pusuit is the only way i believe we can appreciate God for creating us in this world.
    Therefore, FINDING FOCUS IN LIFE is key to LIVING.

    Torufinikeme CHRISTOPHER.

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Seth Barnes

I'm motivated to join God in his global reclamation project. He's on the move, setting his sons and daughters free from their places of captivity. And he's partnering with those of us who have been freed to go and free others.



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