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If you ask a random person to identify which skills can most help contribute to success, you’ll get a wide range of answers. However, ask someone who’s already achieved a good deal of success in their own life and you’re likely to see one skill that keeps getting mentioned — focus. The power to stay focused despite a myriad of distractions can be a superpower that helps many people get ahead. To illustrate this, we’ve looked to the career of David Schmidt, CEO of LifeWave, a leading health and wellness company.
Professional background
Let’s first take a quick look at the career of David Schmidt to better understand his work focus, which has ultimately led to his success at LifeWave. Known by many for his skills as an inventor, the businessman was motivated from an early age to follow that pursuit. He cites the work of Thomas Edison as a guiding influence in this passion, noting that the famous inventor’s more than 1,000 patents showed not only a focus on innovation but a tireless pursuit of improving the lives of others.
That pursuit has manifested in Schmidt’s life in a variety of ways. With a career focused on business and design, he’s created a number of patented inventions over the years to improve upon what has come before. This work has led him to create alternate procedures for synthesizing oxygen and hydrogen, has led to the design of a bladeless turbine engine, and contributed to advancements in combustion rocket engines. These efforts eventually led to his participation in a US Navy mini-sub project, where he worked to develop new methods of supporting energy and stamina among elite Navy personnel.
Planning your leisure
The body of work accomplished by this inventor has spanned multiple fields and has produced a range of useful innovations. One of the ways that he’s been able to accomplish so much has been due to his intentional choice of using leisure time productively.
This might seem like a surprising area to pay attention to when trying to improve one’s focus, but it actually can have a huge effect on the rest of a person’s life. A reason for this is the sheer amount of time that leisure takes up in a typical day. For many Americans, television is a big part of these activities. In many instances, this can mean more than two hours of television per day. That can be a huge draw on a person’s waking hours and leaves them less available to engage in other, potentially more productive, activities.
Besides the amount of leisure time, the quality of a person’s leisure time can also be important. That’s because this time can be used to not only blow off some steam but to additionally build important skills. Take the idea of meditation as an example. While meditation can be relaxing and can help a person decompress after a long day, it can also serve to build focus and mental resilience. These skills can then be transferred to other parts of a person’s life to great effect.
Intentional workflow
Focusing on your professional efforts is an important part of making sure you’re producing your greatest work, but it’s not the only thing you need to be mindful of in your day-to-day. In many ways, just as important as what you’re working on is how you’re working on it. Creating an intentional process for how you complete your work can be an important part of ensuring that you’re using your energy in the most directed, most effective way possible. What are you doing and why?
To this end, David Schmidt has set up a streamlined workflow at LifeWave to help bring new products to market. Since the company’s focus is on health and wellness, an important part of this process is innovating new designs and testing them in a laboratory setting. To ensure this part of the process is well-integrated into development, he has set up in-house labs for the company’s operations. In this way, collaborating scientists can work in a consistent setting and produce the highest quality research possible in order to support the company’s goals.
Long Term efforts
Another area in which focus can contribute to success is the ability of a person to direct their intention over a long period of time, working to a plan. This can be important when trying to find a first success since such a success is often preceded by many failures. Staying focused on what your end goal is, and working to a plan, can help you not only weather failures as they occur, but also learn from them. This can leave you better-equipped to achieve success when the timing is right. This type of focus can also have the additional benefit of motivating inventors to stay committed to their efforts even after they’ve achieved a first major success.
In the work of David Schmidt, this can be seen by the consistent growth of LifeWave and his drive to continue delivering new offerings to his customers. While the company has found plenty of success through its original line of phototherapy patches, which use reflected light to promote health and wellness, it hasn’t stopped there. LifeWave has recently released a new, patented stem cell activation patch called X39, that is the result of more than ten years of research and design. This newest release goes to show the power of continual focus on a certain technology, even after success has been realized, and how someone can use that focus to build even greater levels of achievement.
While it’s true that a number of different skills can contribute to a person’s success, it’s also clear that some skills can have a greater benefit than others. Cultivating focus is an area that can pay dividends through more effective use of leisure time, more intentional workflow, and a determination to succeed in the long term. The above examples from the life of David Schmidt and his work at LifeWave help to highlight how this trait is beneficial in practice. Consider cultivating focus in your life as you strive towards even greater success and professional satisfaction of your own.
