Keep Your Eye On The Goal
Some hundreds of years ago, back when I was a lad in the ninteen-hundred and seventies, I was playing a wargame with a friend of mine, as I often did. In this particular game, though, I made a very bad mistake; I beat the crap out of his army, thrashing it all over the map.
Unfortunately, the victory conditions–what you had to do to win–in that particular game didn’t involved beating up the other fellow’s army so much as taking and holding cities. I was having so much fun thrashing his army that I forgot to do this. I won almost all the battles, but lost the war because I didn’t pay enough attention to what ‘winning’ meant.
Keep your eye on your goals. A success that doesn’t move you closer to those goals is not a success; it’s a distraction.