Do You Know What You Want and Are You Actually Focused on Getting It?

Most people have a general sense of what they want. A better role. A stronger team. More time with the family. A project they are proud of. A business of their own. The problem is not the wanting. It is the focusing. Desire without a focal point scatters into busyness, distraction, and slow drift toward whatever the loudest demand of the day happens to be. Jason Schroeder picks up where Think and Grow Rich left off in this episode and asks the harder question: now that you know what you want, are you willing to build your life around getting it?

Four Things You Can Do Starting Tomorrow

Jason opened the core teaching with a framework from Brian Tracy’s book Focal Point that is disarmingly simple and almost universally ignored. There are four actions available to anyone who wants to change their results. Do more of the things that bring the most value. Do less of the habits and behaviors that are holding you back. Start doing the things that the people living the life you want are already doing. Stop doing the things those same people have left behind.

He was direct about why this sounds obvious but rarely gets applied. Most people expect different results without changing their actual behaviors. They add new knowledge on top of unchanged habits and wonder why nothing shifts. The framework forces a different kind of honesty. Not just what do I want to add, but what am I willing to stop? Not just what should I do more of, but what is currently eating the time and energy that should be going somewhere else?

The answer is different for everyone, but the practice of asking the question consistently is the same for all of them. Jason has applied this framework at every level of his career, from assistant superintendent to field operations director to building Elevate Construction. Before stepping into each new role, he would design the role deliberately. What reading did this position require? What habits needed to be built? What leader standard work would structure the week? What tools, systems, and physical environment would set him up to perform at the level he intended? Everything was engineered before the role started, not figured out on the fly after it was already in motion.

The 80-20 Rule and Your Highest Value Work

One of the most practical concepts in this episode is the Pareto Principle applied to daily work. Out of ten things a person does on a given day, roughly two of them produce the most meaningful results. Those two things are the focal point. Everything else should be delegated, simplified, or eliminated.

Jason connected this directly to leader standard work. When you identify the two or three activities that produce the greatest return for your role, those activities belong on your weekly schedule as protected time. Not as aspirational items on a list that get bumped when something urgent appears. As committed blocks that the rest of the week is organized around.

He also challenged the mindset of treating employment as a clock to run out. If you are spending time at work drifting through low-value tasks or filling hours without intention, you are not just underperforming for your employer. You are underinvesting in yourself. The time spent on work that does not develop your skill or advance your role is time that will not come back. Jason’s recommendation is to treat your workday the way a self-employed person treats it. Every hour has a cost. Every task either builds the future or delays it. There is no neutral.

Go a Foot Wide and a Mile Deep

One of the most memorable phrases from this episode came when Jason described how mastery actually happens. Do not go a mile wide and a foot deep. Go a foot wide and a mile deep. Pick the skill, the system, or the knowledge area that matters most for where you are trying to go, and pursue it with depth and consistency until you own it. Then move to the next one.

This applies directly to the construction professional trying to build a career. If you need to learn AutoCAD, learn it until it is no longer a limitation. If you need to understand change order management, go deep on that until you can run the process without hesitation. If you need to get better at leading foremen, communicating with owners, or managing procurement, pick one and pursue it deliberately. The person who is mediocre at fifteen things is replaceable. The person who is genuinely excellent at a handful of critical skills is not.

Jason also made a point about the relationships and inputs that shape the ceiling of what is possible. You are the average of your five closest relationships. You are shaped by the last five books you have read. You are a product of what your attention has been feeding on. This is not a moral argument. It is a mechanical one. Whatever you concentrate on grows. If your attention has been on low-value content, low-growth conversations, and low-stakes tasks, the results will reflect that. The inverse is equally true, and the change is available to anyone willing to make it deliberately.

Here are the focus questions Jason left open for every listener to sit with:

• What should you do more of starting this week?
• What should you do less of starting this week?
• What should you stop doing entirely? 
• What should you start doing that you have been putting off?
• Are you willing to make the change or just thinking about it?

That last question is the one that separates the people who take this seriously from the ones who find it interesting and move on.

Leverage and Balance Are Not Opposites

Jason pushed back against the idea that focus requires grinding alone at the expense of everything else in life. His argument is actually the opposite. When you are focused on your highest value activities and protecting that time deliberately, you create the conditions for leverage. You delegate what someone else can do. You simplify the systems around you. You use other people’s knowledge, experience, failures, contacts, and energy to accelerate your own progress rather than trying to learn everything through personal trial and error.

That leverage is what makes balance possible. Not by working less, but by working on the right things so efficiently that there is genuine capacity left for the rest of life. The family. The health. The relationships. The spiritual life. Jason was clear that a person who ignores these dimensions in pursuit of career focus is not building toward success. They are building toward a narrower version of themselves that will eventually run out of fuel. The whole life has to be maintained, even if one area is receiving more concentrated energy for a defined period of time.

If your project needs superintendent coaching, project support, or leadership development, Elevate Construction can help your field teams stabilize, schedule, and flow.

The Challenge

Take thirty minutes this week and answer the four focal point questions in writing. What to do more of. What to do less of. What to start. What to stop. Then identify your two highest value activities in your current role and put them on your calendar as protected time for the next four weeks. Do not add this to a list. Schedule it. The difference between a goal written down and a goal scheduled is the difference between intention and commitment.

“If you aren’t learning, no one can help you. But if you are determined to learn, no one can stop you.” Brian Tracy

On we go.

FAQ

What is the Focal Point framework in simple terms?

It is a four-part practice: do more of what works, do less of what does not, start what the best version of you would already be doing, and stop what is holding you back. Applied consistently, it reorganizes your time around results.

What does going a foot wide and a mile deep mean in practice?

It means choosing the most important skill or knowledge area for where you are going and pursuing it with depth until you own it, rather than spreading your learning thinly across too many directions at once.

How does the 80-20 rule apply to construction leadership?

Two or three activities in any leadership role produce the majority of the results. Identifying those activities and protecting time for them in your weekly standard work is how high performance becomes repeatable rather than accidental.

Can you focus intensely on career without sacrificing everything else?

Yes, if the focus produces leverage. When you delegate, simplify, and use other people’s resources and knowledge, you can advance quickly without hollowing out the rest of your life. The goal is a complete human being moving toward a defined destination, not a narrower one.