Life as a business owner can be tough and lonely. It’s easy to lose track of your goals and squander potential, whether you’ve been in business for two years or 20.

Running a business requires a constant, singular commitment to your vision, your employees and your best self. If you aren’t prepared, you might miss opportunities to enhance your relationships and accomplishments.

Since starting my company, I’ve noticed three human tendencies that can get in the way of any business, no matter what size. They can lead to business owners getting stuck and complacent, failing to move forward and eventually falling behind. But there are ways to avoid getting trapped in them. Business owners need to know what to look out for and need a plan to cognitively deal with human tendencies before they manifest in your behavior.

To be successful, it is so important to not only know your limits and boundaries, but also where you’re strongest. Nobody can do everything, but some people can do a few things well enough to turn them into value for others. What we should strive to do is identify our key strengths — those things we do better than anyone else — and push out all the rest. For business owners, this means focusing on just one part of the business and delegating the rest to your employees. If you’re an owner and your strengths lie in being in the field, then it might be a better option to appoint someone who’s really good at leadership to run your company than to do it yourself.

Compensation based on performance is not just for salesmen or athletes anymore, it’s for everyone. Your performance in the role you play is more important than the role itself. You might feel like being the owner or the leader is the most important job. However, what’s a leader without people willing to follow them? Your job does not matter as much as how good you are at doing your job. Whatever work you decide to do, work hard to be the best and you’ll find that you’ll get paid the most.  

Learn to delegate

As business owners, we need to know our own strengths and the strengths of those people with whom we surround ourselves. If you’re assigning tasks to people who just aren’t very good at those tasks, they won’t get done as well as they should and you are wasting time and resources. But if you delegate according to your employees’ strengths, you can start to deliver real value to your customers and stakeholders and really start growing your company as a result.

Narrow your focus

The thing you might want to ask is, “How can I, as a business owner, only focus on my strengths? Won’t things get missed or left out?” And the answer is: trust. Trust in yourself and those you have delegated to. Develop a personal mission statement, and keep it front and center in your mind at all times. You need something that drives you and your team on a fundamental level, that keeps you all on track. Ultimately, you need to put your whole self into your business, into those strengths, relentlessly until you become the best at whatever it is that you’re doing. In order to do that, you need employees who can and will do the same with their responsibilities, so you can delegate effectively.

Every morning, when I get up, I make a point to recite a personal mission statement. I even have it written on my mirror. After that, I take some time to read and reflect on the things I’m grateful for, and that helps me stay focused on what my goals are and how to get there throughout the day.

If you’re unsure of what to focus on, figure out what your one, singular purpose is. Find a problem in your life, and work to solve it as quickly as possible. Home in on that one thing you want to achieve, chase after it, push aside distraction and do whatever it takes to reach that goal. You’ll gain confidence in yourself, and future goals will be that much easier to achieve.

Avoid distraction

There’s so much that can distract us. Every day, we wake up and we’re just bombarded by distraction: the news, politics, even the weather. When I was working for a previous employer, one of my distractions was a competitor of ours who kept copying my ads. Every week, I would look at their ads and they were exactly the same as mine — except for one really good ad that featured the charred husk of a building. Our competitor’s building had burnt down, and he was trying to sell the equipment he had bought just before the busy season to continue running his business.

It was a really good ad, and I got so focused on it that I let it distract me. I went to my boss’ office, told him we needed to burn our building down, and he looked at me like I was crazy. He leaned over his desk and told me something important: He didn’t care what our competitors were doing. He wanted me to focus on what I was doing, what our company was doing, because my job was to generate leads. He helped me to stay focused on what I could control — my own advertising, not trying to copy our competition — and we ended up putting together some of the best ads we ever ran.

Take it to the next level

The lesson in this is to focus on what you can control. Don’t let other things distract you. Focus on your singular purpose, and help your employees do the same. Take some time every morning to really home in on what you want out of life and author your own destiny. Take some time away from social media, shove those distractions out of your mind and workplace, and focus on the task at hand.

In order to take your business to the next level, start with your focus. Your focus determines how you think, and how you think is what drives your emotions and actions. In order to have the right actions, which will build a stronger and more effective business, the first thing you need to do is change your focus by ignoring distractions. Keep what’s most important front and center in your mind, and you’ll find there’s nowhere to go but up.