I get to talk to a lot of friends and acquaintances about different things going on in our lives on both a personal, and professional level. We talk about different things like what we want to do, what our plans are, and how we’re going about trying to accomplish them.

The more I had these conversations, whether talking about them or myself, I started to realize that all the activities we do in life can be characterized into two main categories.

1. The things we do to “tread water” and keep ourselves or our dreams afloat.

2. The things we do that are going to get us to the “shore” or “final destination” we’re trying to get to.

I realized that these two factors are what will really transform your business and take it to the next level.

Obviously, both of them are needed to stay alive, and are equally important; but here’s where the problem is.

If you’re just working on “treading water” to stay afloat, then you’re never moving forward, and you never get closer to reaching your goals. In business that would be things like support emails, reading forums, replying to customer emails, and so forth. All of these are activities that will help your business to continue “treading water” and staying afloat, but they aren’t the things that will eventually catapult your business and take you to that “final destination” you want to get to.

So while “treading water” and staying afloat is important, the other thing you want to focus on is swimming towards that shore.

In business, that would be refining your product, making changes to it based on customer feedback, looking at your sales strategy, your conversions, your sales funnels, getting traffic to your website, and so on. These are the things you’re going to want to focus on so you can eventually get to that next level and where you want to be.

So what are you doing to help you reach your goals?