“And immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him, and said unto him, O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?” Matthew 14:31, KJV

I recently read on article pertaining to entrepreneurship. The article addressed several characteristics of successful entrepreneurs, but none of the characteristics struck me more than the following one: wildly successful people have 1,000 fewer thoughts a day than others, which allows the successful people to have exceptional focus on their goals. (Source: Penelope Trunk, http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2007/04/23/you-dont-need-to-love-risk-taking-to-start-your-own-business/).

Successful entrepreneur Alex Shear concurred, stating that he tried to focus on his next step instead of looking at the whole project. “If you think too much about the big picture,” Shear said, “it can paralyze you — mess you up in the moment.”

In Matthew 14, Peter suffered from this same paralysis. He took his eyes off of Jesus, looked rather at the big picture, and succumbed to a paralysis that weakened his faith. For the entrepreneur, a huge key to success is to stay focused on the goal and ignore, as much as possible, all that would distract from the goal. For the Christian, the key to success is to stay focused on Jesus and ignore, as much as possible, the circumstances that would take your eyes off of Him. Certainly, we have to acknowledge troubling circumstances. But, we don’t have to focus on them. We don’t have to allow them to saturate our thoughts and attitudes. We don’t have to let them paralyze us. Rather, we ought focus on Christ, and Christ alone should saturate our thoughts and attitudes. Christ can and will grant us a victorious Christian life, no matter what our earthly circumstances, if we will only keep our eyes on Him!