Numbers

Achievement is the direct result of diligence. And diligence is a matter of consistent effort over a period of time. I've found that sustained effort is often made more difficult because it can be hard to see the big picture when I'm down in the details.

For instance, last summer during one of my periods of drumming up business, I had to contact a lot of people. A lot. Now, I could have just contacted a whole bunch of people and hoped that it would work out before I got too tired of reaching out. But that can be dangerous, at least for me, because I can over estimate how much work I've put in at any given moment.

Instead I kept careful track of the number of people I contacted. And at the beginning I reminded myself that only about 1 percent of contacts will result in a working gig. What this did was it set up the right expectations. So, when I got to day 30, and there still wasn't any bites, I could rest easy knowing that I still hadn't played the odds sufficiently.

All this is a long way to say that setting proper expectations, followed by disciplined action, results in better returns (I eventually got a client, but it took many weeks).

So, these days I track almost everything I do with a list of numbers. It's reassuring and helps me to see the incremental progress toward my goals. I have a number for how many tutorials I've made, how many cinematic articles I've written, and of course how many potential clients I've reached out to. I even have one for the number of blog entries I've written for this blog.

This was blog entry #79.

Bailey