Focus Beats FOMO Every Time

Every week I talk to founders who are drowning in possibility. They’ve seen what’s working for other people. They’ve read the case studies. They’ve watched the market move. And they’re terrified of missing the wave. So they chase. They pivot toward whatever seems hot. They imitate the strategies that worked for someone else. They scan LinkedIn and Reddit for signals of where the market is heading, then scramble to get there first.

This almost never works.

The Imitation Trap

When you chase what other people are doing, you’re not distinguishing yourself. You’re just another person doing the same thing, arriving late to wherever everyone else already is.

Worse, you’re growing your business by looking backwards. You’re making decisions based on where the market was, not where it’s going. By the time you’ve copied someone’s playbook, they’ve already moved on to the next chapter.

I’ve watched this pattern play out dozens of times. A founder sees a competitor succeeding with a particular approach and decides to replicate it. But that competitor’s success came from a specific combination of timing, audience, resources, and—critically—who they are. The playbook doesn’t transfer because the context doesn’t transfer.

Why Fit Matters More Than Opportunity

The startup ecosystem loves to talk about product-market fit. Find a need. Build for it. Scale.

But this framing skips something essential: you.

What do you bring to this? Why are you uniquely suited to solve this problem? What do you know that others don’t? What perspective, experience, or capability makes this your thing to build?

I’ve written before about the four big questions every business needs to answer: What is it? Who is it for? Why should they care? And—the one people skip—why you?

The “why you” question is uncomfortable because it forces honesty. Maybe you spotted a market opportunity. Great. But if the only thing you bring is “I noticed this need exists,” you’re setting yourself up to get swamped by people who actually know the space. People with domain experience. People with existing relationships. People who’ve been thinking about this problem for years.

Rigid and Flexible at the Same Time

The founders I know who’ve actually built something—who’ve made it through the long middle part where most people quit—share a particular quality. They hold two seemingly contradictory things at once.

And they’re flexible about everything else: the specific features, the go-to-market strategy, the pricing model, the target customer segment.

The core mission stays. The execution evolves.

Every startup I’ve been involved with has changed fundamentally within 6-18 months of starting. Not because the founders were wrong, but because there’s so much you can only learn by doing. The market teaches you things that no amount of research can anticipate.

But here’s the thing: the founders who navigate these pivots successfully are the ones who know which parts to hold onto. They let the market reshape the how while protecting the why. They stay flexible on tactics while remaining rigid on the underlying insight that makes their approach valuable.

If you don’t know why you’re uniquely suited to this problem, you have nothing to hold onto when the pivots come. You’ll just keep chasing the next signal, the next trend, the next thing that seems to be working for someone else.

The Compounding Illusion

When you look at successful people—the founders, the creators, the builders who seem to produce an uncommon amount of output—it’s tempting to assume they’re operating on a different level. More discipline. More efficiency. More hours in the day.

I don’t think that’s what’s actually happening.

What I see, when I look closely at the people who’ve built something real, is stacked consistency. Day after day of showing up. Week after week of trying, learning, adjusting, trying again. The apparent prolificness is compounded effort—not superhuman output, but ordinary effort accumulated over uncommon timeframes.

There’s a saying that people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in a decade. I think about this constantly.

Most founders I meet are optimizing for the wrong timescale. They’re looking for the quick win, the growth hack, the shortcut that gets them to the finish line faster. But there is no finish line. There’s just the work, and whether you’re still doing it.

The Long Game

Business is a long-term commitment. The payoff isn’t in year one. The payoff is in years five through ten, when all that compounded effort has built something that actually matters.

I know that’s not what people want to hear. We’re trained to think in sprints. Launch, measure, iterate, exit. Move fast and break things.

But the reality is slower. The reality is that sustainable businesses—the ones that support lives and create value and actually work—take time to build. You’re not looking to cash out in year one. You’re making an investment in something that will matter later.

That’s what makes all of it worth it: the uncertainty, the risk, the sleepless nights, the constant problem-solving. You’re not doing this for a quick return. You’re doing it because you believe that years of focused effort will compound into something you can be proud of.

And that only happens if you stay focused. If you stop chasing every shiny object. If you commit to your thing and actually see it through.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Let me be concrete about what focus actually means:

Choose carefully. Don’t start something just because it seems like a good opportunity. Start something because it fits you—your skills, your experience, your interests, your unfair advantages. The intersection of market need and personal fit is where sustainable businesses live. And, most importantly, choose something you actually understand (and not just think you understand).

Commit fully. Half-commitment produces half-results. Once you’ve chosen, go all in. That doesn’t mean being reckless. It means not hedging, not keeping one foot out the door, not treating your business like something you’ll really invest in once it proves itself.

Protect your core. Know what you won’t compromise on. Know why you’re doing this and not something else. When the pivots come—and they will—you need to know which parts to hold onto and which parts to let go.

Show up consistently. The secret to prolific output isn’t efficiency. It’s consistency. One foot in front of the other, day after day, for longer than seems reasonable. This is how ordinary effort becomes extraordinary results.

Think in years, not months. You’re building something that should exist in a decade. Make decisions accordingly. Don’t sacrifice long-term positioning for short-term gains.

The Hard Part

I won’t pretend this is easy. Starting is hard. Staying focused when everyone around you seems to be succeeding with something else is hard. Committing to a long timeline when you’re not sure if it’s going to work is hard.

But chasing trends is harder in the long run. It’s exhausting. It’s demoralizing. And it doesn’t work.

The founders who build something real are the ones who find their thing and stick with it. Who let the market teach them without losing themselves. Who show up day after day and let the effort compound.

Focus beats FOMO. Every time.

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The startup ecosystem’s obsession with opportunity spotting misses something fundamental: you can’t build a sustainable business by copying what worked for someone else. The path forward is finding where market need intersects with what you—specifically you—are suited to build. And then committing to it for longer than feels comfortable.