This is as clear as it gets.

Mastery

“We are going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it, because nothing is perfect.  But we are going to relentlessly chase it, because in the process we will catch excellence.”
                                                                                    - Vince Lombardi

Focus, focus, focus.  Practice, practice, practice.

Of course, no one can excel at everything; but excellence in a few, key disciplines seems typically to spell the difference between a painfully stable company (or a failure) and a remarkable success.  In fact, in my experience, a company that masters a few dominant factors can tolerate mediocrity in other areas.

Picture this.  You want to penetrate an office wall.  You run at it, arms and legs flailing.  What happens?  A broken nose, perhaps.  In animated cartoons characters pass through walls, leaving an opening precisely the shape of their bodies.  That doesn’t work in real life.

You have a chance to penetrate that wall, however, with a well-directed and fully committed fist.  The martial arts people will tell you that they strike a target that is beyond the barrier.  To break a board, they strike beyond the board.  That makes the board only an incidental nuisance along the way.

"OK, Jim," you say; "but please boil all this down to something that is usefully simple." 

You win.  Here it is.

To achieve success, you must first define success and fully commit to it.  Then you must focus your limited resources, in order to act with maximum available force, meanwhile reducing barriers to incidental nuisances.  And never confuse the barriers with the target itself.

•    Define success
•    Fully commit
•    Focus limited resources
•    Act with maximum available force
•    Reduce barriers to incidental nuisances