The hardest business skill is two letters long! I almost built a software company in the ‘90s. Thank God I didn’t. We had several thousand apartment units. I was running the accounting. Already buried in work. And I was so frustrated with the property management software we were using that I started seriously exploring building our own. The pull was real. I could see every flaw in what we were using. I knew exactly what we needed. And I had the conviction that we could build something better. But I was already drowning. So I said no. People hear that and assume it was a calculated decision. It wasn’t. I was working 80 hours a week and couldn’t add a second company to the pile without something breaking. Probably me. Steve Jobs said it at the 1997 WWDC: focus isn’t saying yes to the thing you need to focus on. It’s saying no to the hundred other good ideas. He was so committed to this that when he came back to Apple, he cut hundreds of products down to 10. This is playing out in real time with OpenAI. They spent the last year trying to be everything. A video platform. A shopping portal. AI erotica. A hardware device. A web browser. Music generation. Smart glasses. This month they killed Sora, scaled back their shopping feature, and pulled back on adult content. Their head of applications told employees they’re pausing all “side quests” to focus on coding and business users. The most well-funded AI company on the planet just learned what a guy running apartments in the ‘90s figured out at 2am: you can’t do everything at once. Everyone points to Elon when they hear this. “He runs five companies.” Sure. Elon’s Elon. You’re not. Neither am I. For every Musk there are ten thousand founders who tried to juggle everything and cratered quietly. Nobody writes a biography about the person who spread themselves so thin they disappeared. The people who last long enough to win are the ones who stopped adding. What are you saying yes to right now that’s slowly diluting the one thing that’s actually working? https://lnkd.in/eQvWyTQS