The goal of every article I publish is to move away from the “5 steps to success” mentality.

My core message, which hopefully rings through, is: do you and do it your way. And surround yourself with people who will influence you to be even more of who you genuinely are.

It’s a mentality that will actually help you prioritize better because half of the things on our to-do lists are things we’ve been told we’re “supposed” to be doing in order to be great at (fill in the blank).

All those well-intentioned “steps to build a business” or “steps to happiness” or “steps to success” are inadvertently moving us closer to burnout and feeling like an incompetent failure. If you’re not meditating every morning, drinking your celery juice, and uploading twenty social media posts per day, then you’re doing it wrong, says the internet lord.

If you read Rocket Fuel, which I highly recommend, you’ll learn about two types of people. Visionaries and Integrators.

Visionaries are messy and chaotic. They have a new idea every minute and sometimes that means projects will slip through the cracks. But this chaos is what drives a business forward. Frankly, it’s the environment where the best ideas will come from. So feeling guilty and trying to reign in this organized chaos will only kill the brilliance that brings you success.

Integrators, on the other hand, have systems and processes that make you wonder what magical elixir they’ve been drinking every morning. They know how to execute and have impeccable consistency in their actions.

When you look at any truly successful business, you will often find a partnership at the top between these two personality types. The visionary who brings the ideas, and the integrator who sorts through them and executes on the best ones. Magic happens when each person stays in their lane and goes all in on their strength.

What binds them together—despite having what seems to be polar opposite brains—is a single shared vision.

A visionary without a clear vision is spread too thin and exhausted.

An integrator without a clear vision is doing busy work without any progress.

You want to avoid becoming efficient at completing busy work. The goal is to eliminate everything that’s not moving you towards your vision.

So how do successful people prioritize?

They put on blinders and push hard on a single vision until it becomes reality. Almost in an obsessive way. They are in a bubble of their own, and take advice only from a select few that have been allowed into their bubble. Prioritization will happen at the snap of a finger when the vision is clear.

How unsuccessful people differ is that they don’t have a vision. They ask everyone for this answer and get swayed by their opinions, getting blown from one direction to another depending on who they speak with. Resulting in a to-do list that’s not backed by any real purpose.

Let’s get this out in the open: you will never have enough time to do everything and you will always feel like you could be doing more. Take that as permission to wipe clear your to-do list.

Choose ONE thing you will focus on this month.

Plan your week to maximize the time spent moving towards it. Eliminate or outsource busy work.

Put blinders on and build what you want in YOUR way.

“Some people never become who they are; they stop trusting in themselves; they conform to the tastes of others, and they end up wearing a mask that hides their true nature. If you allow yourself to learn who you really are by paying attention to that voice and force within you, then you can become what you were fated to become — an individual, a Master.”

Robert Greene