How Do We Measure Success
Continuing on the importance of consistency, we not only have to be consistent with our actions, but we also need to stay consistent with our metrics. We live in an ever-evolving world with an infinite amount of information at our fingertips. With every new thing we learn, we will likely want to change things.
Evolution is great, and we have to stay present with the trends to ensure that we are making the impacts we want. The social media strategy that was employed ten years ago would be pretty ineffective today. The rules for promoting a business on LinkedIn are vastly different than trying to achieve the same goal on Instagram.
But here's the thing: all those changes that we learn about can have us adjusting our strategy far too quickly. It sets us up for failure on an emotional level. Using slightly outdated methods that work for our pace of life will always bring more success than trying a new tool every day.
We have to find our footing somewhere. And we have to decide the metrics we will use to measure success and stick with it. If my metric for success is the number of visitors to my blog (it's not), then that is the thing that I need to be monitoring on a weekly and monthly basis.
There are effort-based and results-based things that we can use to measure success. The effort-based metrics come from the work we put in. This might be writing my three posts every week. It could be putting in 30 minutes of knitting a day. We could measure it by how many people we've talked to about our business.
Then, there are results-based measurements, which are not solely based on our actions but rather on the product that those actions produce. This would be more like measuring likes on a reel, the number on the scale, or how many people sent in orders for our products. These things are all important depending on our dreams, but they are much harder to control. We can put in the same effort every day, and the results could still vary wildly because we are introducing the variable of other people.
Both are important to track and celebrate, but personally, I prefer effort-based metrics for success. I've had good months of views on the blog, and I've had bad. Overall, I am trending upward, but if the only thing that mattered to me was the number at the end of the month, then I would have spent most of this journey disappointed.
Instead, I pay attention to my effort-based progress. I have written three times a week for the past 30 weeks. During those weeks, I've written a total of 251,629 words. For context, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix has 257,154 words. Those numbers keep growing as I stay consistent. And in turn, those numbers will increase my result-based numbers.
These are the metrics that I will maintain for quite some time to measure my success. There will come a day when I transition, but I need to stick with this plan for long enough to give it time to start working. My methods will change sometimes. Some writings will be longer, and some will be shorter. But we have to set our baselines to measure success. For me, for right now, that's three posts a week.
This puts the right amount of pressure on me. It's enough that it gives me the deadline I need to get my work done. But it's also flexible enough that on the good weeks, I can do more, and on the bad weeks, I can do less, as long as I hit my three. We have to determine the best metric to measure success for our dreams. And then we will stick with that for a very long time.
Changing the goalposts for our dreams too frequently will make it hard for us to live up to the standard. It gives less room for grace and makes us quicker to punish ourselves for messing up. When we only spend a short period of time on one measure, then we can easily miss the opportunity to live up to that standard. Too many failures in a row, and we start doubting our capacity to achieve our dreams.
We need to measure these things so that we know we are making progress. We need to believe that our dream is achievable, even if that achievement is still very far away. Every part of this process should be designed to set ourselves up for success. Feeling good keeps us in the game long enough so that one day, the dream that was made for us can be ours.