Being prolific – start with your first step

Evan Carmichael has had over 300m views on his YouTube channel and has made more than 10000 videos.

I keep writing about how it is more important to be prolific than perfect (a statement which I took from Joe Polish)

Evan started making these videos from 2009. So in less than thirteen years he’s made more than ten thousand videos or close to about 900 videos a year or 3 videos a day assuming he was taking one day off.

Now that is what prolific is. Due to that, today he has more than 3 million subscribers on YouTube itself.

I do know that he’s also an author but I don’t know if he’s got got other social media channels on other platforms.

There’s a positive feedback loop which gets created when you reach a critical mass. Evan himself mentions that in the first 5 years, since he started posting videos on YouTube, he had only 5000 subscribers and then in the next 5 years he crossed two million. Obviously he must have taken other steps as he learnt the game, to become better and better.

But you can’t become prolific if you don’t start with your first step. In the first two years of this blog, I found it difficult to post 52 posts, but subsequently I got into the rhythm and today I have been able to cross more than 400 posts. Not all posts are great. But the fact is that I don’t let perfect come in the way of being prolific.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Prolific versus Perfect – 2

Excellence, Marketing, messaging, persistence

Excellence requires repetition.

Some call it the 10000 hour rule. Int is said that you need to do about 10000 hours of practice at learning something, before you become an expert. Its about ensuring persistence in your endevour.

This issue came up in a discussion today where the people supposedly are passionate about what they are doing but we are not getting the results. They had this argument that they were also getting frustrated when not getting results.

When we tried to analyse the challenges, one of the key challenge was the fact that we did not have enough feedback of how the customers react to our messaging. You have to test a lot of messaging till you are able to actually get to the right piece.

You can refine your messaging or sales pitch only when you interact with enough people, understand the inputs that the prospects give and what the competition is doing. Now if you are a prolific sales person and do 200 calls a days (just for example) and there’s another who’s doing 100 calls a day and both fail 90% of the time, with the first sale person after 20 days of calling you would have got a feedback of 3600 calls, and at the end of a year this would be close to 45000 interactions versus the other person’s 22000 failures.

Within one year the company whose sales people are prolific and are getting 45000 “no” would be way ahead of a company with sales people with just 22000 “no”. They would have refined their product pitch / messaging that many more times to come to near perfection within a year.

To the above argument I get a very standard response, and maybe you also would have it going on in your mind, that after some time statistically the changes would be minor. You are absolutely right about that. But the faster you reach that point, the more sales you pick up till the other company reaches that point.

If I can get my 10000 hours of practice in 3 years versus someone else who will take 5 years then the 2 years window that I have I can exploit to earn so much more , sell so much more or whatever I wish to. While the 10000 hour rule has been around for a long time now, the idea of speed in getting to the 10000 hours was something that I got from hearing Joe Polish in his Ilovemarketing.com podcasts.

The more prolific I am the more I can try new things, the more feedback I will get and the faster I can improve. Now if you have a coach along the way it becomes that much more quicker to climb the curve towards expertise. But you still have to do the hardwork. There’s no easy way out of it.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Prolific versus perfect

confidence, persistence

I generally write at the end of my workday. Everyday before I start writing I have a question mark on what I would be able to write today. Everyday I think about what topic would of interest to my readers and where could I add value.Everyday I have this very strong inclination to not write.

But then I don’t want to break the momentum. As Joe Polish says it’s better to be prolific rather than perfect. If you practice something so often you will make lots of mistakes, but the faster you make mistakes, the more you will learn. The more you learn the higher is the chance that you will win eventually.

So my writing is not perfect. I write short notes so that while you are waiting in the line to pick up your coffee, you can read it. Over the years I hope my writing is becoming better.

One thing though is that based on this principle of being prolific rather than perfect, I can get into a flow state faster. Now once I start hitting the keys on my tablet or computer, my brain goes into a flow state and I start typing whatever ideas come into my mind. Being prolific is all about being persistent. As you persist, you also get the confidence to do even more.

Does that mean that I have become a “writer”. Absolutely not. I just pen my thoughts in a free flowing style. As a matter of fact a lot of authors may find my style absolutely rubbish. Can I eventually become a writer. Well maybe, who knows.

Can anyone following this model become a writer – maybe. But if they don’t start practicing writing, they anyway won’t become a writer.

Can this be used in other areas as well.

I know of sales and marketing for sure. Sales is a job which requires you to be hard skinned to face rejection and to qualify prospects better. If you get scared in calling out a prospect, from fear of rejection, you anyway won’t get sales to happen. I have learnt it the hard way. However if you call enough of the “right” prospects, you will eventually figure out ways to sell better. Add a mentor into the recipe and you can actually shorten the learning curve dramatically.

So this brings me to the end of the post for today. I hope your coffee is ready.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!