A big part of success is how you manage your energy and where you direct that focus. Focus means putting your time, money, energy, and other resources toward what will move you closer to your goals while minimizing distractions. Distractions are anything that derails your focus and takes you farther away from what you're working toward.

Although this seems simple, many people struggle to focus on the actions that will actually lead to success. Instead, they spend their energy worrying about and fretting over everything that's wrong in their lives.

As a disabled person, I've spent long periods thinking about how my disability makes everything more challenging—and even worse, how it robbed me of an amazing life. I've learned that I need to avoid a victim mindset and focus on putting my energy into what's going to get me closer to my goals and dreams.

Part of my definition of acting like a victim is blaming everything on outside factors you have little control over. We can all easily rattle off a list of reasons why we can't achieve success or why life is challenging. From the economy to lack of connections, from office politics to family drama—we all face challenges that seem to hinder our progress.

While we need to spend some time, energy, and focus addressing our challenges, it needs to be the right kind of focus. It shouldn't be all-encompassing or come at the expense of our goals. My reality is that I spend energy dealing with a disability, but there's a crucial difference between dealing with my disability and dwelling on everything it prevents me from doing.

One of the central themes in the content I produce is simple: what you get out of life is what you put into it. If you want to create a successful life, you must invest energy into your goals. You must also get creative in addressing whatever holds you back.

Practically speaking, you need to maximize the return on your energy by becoming more efficient with your resources. This will tap into your potential.

Here are some practical strategies to tap into your potential and sharpen your focus:

1. Focus on Meaningful Goals

Many people don't have meaningful goals. They're just trying to maintain a lifestyle, or worse, they're simply trying to survive. Spend time creating goals that excite and inspire you. The more meaningful or personal your goals are, the more likely you are to fight for them.

2. Focus on Your Process

Every goal has a systematic process filled with actions that need to be executed repeatedly—until and even after you achieve success. Dial in the right habits to get the maximum return on investment for your energy.

3. Focus on Strategic Relationships

Almost any goal requires collaboration. If you want to move up in your career, you'll probably need to network and build relationships with people you can collaborate with, grow alongside, and serve. If you want to grow as an entrepreneur, you might need to build a team with employees and customers, or get a coach or join a mastermind. Even if you want to lose weight, you might engage with a nutritionist or trainer, or simply ask a friend to go for walks with you to add another layer of accountability.

4. Focus on Smartly Addressing Challenges

Any success journey involves dealing with challenges. You could say that part of success is simply how you navigate those challenges. Unfortunately, many people don't know how to deal with them effectively. There's a crucial difference between focusing on how challenging a situation is versus what you can actually do to address those challenges.

5. Focus on Limiting Distractions

The enemy of focus is distractions. If you want to concentrate on your goals and get the maximum return on investment for your energy, you must learn to mitigate distractions. It's impossible—and unwise—to eliminate all distractions. After all, some distractions are beneficial, like going for a walk, calling a friend for inspiration, or smartly engaging in a hobby. We all need to give our minds a break. The key difference between a healthy break and a negative distraction is that a break reenergizes you and gives you more energy, while a negative distraction robs you of it.

The Bottom Line

Managing your energy is a valuable skill that needs to be developed to achieve success. Learning to focus your energy, time, money, and other resources is one of the most worthwhile investments you can make.