The cool thing about Louis Oosthuizen’s Red Dot is its simplicity: easy, do-it-yourself, and low-cost. And effective:
“It’s a good thing to just think about the golf on the golf course,” said Oosthuizen, explaining the Red Dot during his post-match interview. He’d gotten advice about how to do that, and he wanted a reminder.
“I needed, like, a trigger just to get back in the moment… and whenever I look at it I know…just to compose myself, focus on this shot, forget about everything around you.”
Oosthuizen is this year’s British Open Cinderella Story, a basically unknown 27-year-old who is now the 2010 Open Champion.
Focus can do that — make the unexpected happen.
Want to know the one word I hear most when I talk to clients about social media and inbound marketing? “Overwhelmed.” So many ideas. So many things to do. It’s easy to hop from one to another, even when you have an overriding business strategy.
You can sit at your computer and before you look up, hours have gone by, but what do you really have to show for it?
The antidote? Focus. Do what you need to do to get the job done.
Today, Oosthuizen’s goal was to win the Open. Distraction pulls a golfer off his game, even without the high stakes. His Red Dot kept him in the moment, shot by shot, putt by putt, hole by hole. It helped that he put the Red Dot where he knew he’d see it; the nature of the game is that he couldn’t take a shot without looking at his hands, and he couldn’t look at his hands without seeing that Red Dot. But… did you notice that looking at the Red Dot was actually in his pre-shot routine, before he even formally addressed the ball? Focus was obviously job one.
I spend a lot of time at my laptop — doing what I need to do and sometimes getting distracted. It’s a good place for me to put a trigger to help me remember to keep my head in my game, my eyes on goals that are important (long and short term), not just to me but also my clients.
Red Dot? Not something I’ll likely put there. But a Post-it. That works.
Meanwhile, I’m imagining a Disney Movie where, at just the right momemt, someone pulls out a Red Sharpie and saves the day. If the marketing gurus over at Sharpie aren’t focusing right now on how best to capitalize on their unexpected red-marker luck, then I say that they better get their head back in their game!
What’s your Red Dot?
A former Corporate 750 client manager and journalist, Certified Social Media Coach and Inbound Marketing Specialist Robin S. Fox helps clients achieve their business goals.
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