The Power of Small Wins & How I’m Carrying Them into 2016

When you start to work on something you’re passionate about, you can’t expect success right away. You’re going to want it badly and immediately, but unfortunately that’s not how the world works. As a beginner, you need to put it a lot of hard work to learn everything about the industry you’re trying to impact and to develop & fine tune relevant skill sets required for success. This takes time, and you need to be patient.

While building up your expertise, you should focus on making small amounts of progress each and every day. As you continue to grind it out, you’re going to start to see good things happen. You must look for these small moments, celebrate them and use them as fuel to keep the momentum going on whatever you’re setting out to do.

As a writer trying to build an audience, I’ve been putting in pretty consistent effort outside of my normal work for about two months now. In that time frame, I can think of three specific instances of small wins I’ve had that are reminding me why I am on this writer path in the first place.

SMALL WIN #1

My first small win had to do with the amount of social engagement I received on an image quote I created. Ever since I started taking this whole “writer with an audience” thing more seriously, part of my content strategy has been to engage my personal followers across Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter with image quotes (I personally like and use the mobile app InstaQuote).

Whether I come across written quotes in a book, online or while listening to a podcast, I have loved taking note of them for my own records and sharing on Twitter in the form of text-only tweets. Luckily, the authors and entrepreneurs I look up to do the same, except that many of them turn the quotes into images to engage their audiences in a more visually pleasing way. Since I want to become more like them and step up my content game, I’ve started to do the same.

So far, the results have been okay — a few likes here and few comments there. My Instagram followers seem to prefer the more lifestyle imagery I’ve been sharing vs. the image quotes. While I wasn’t expecting to hit a home run with this motivational content right out of the gate given that it’s less native to Instagram, part of me really wanted it to resonate more with my friends and followers.

However, my perception of the performance of the image quotes changed when I started sharing them in the private Choose Yourself Facebook group. The group is made up of ambitious men and women who really connected with James Altucher’s 2013 bestselling book Choose Yourself, which is all about how to pick yourself for success in a rapidly changing world. After sharing the below Seth Godin quote encouraging others to write their own books, I was blown away by the Facebook group’s response (66 likes and 3 comments).

Upon witnessing this, I realized something important: my target audience ≠my current social media following. I can’t expect all my friends and family to like everything I do, as most of them don’t share the same interests and dreams as I do. That’s okay.

Now that I’ve had this moment of clarity, what I need to do is draw the people who share my interests closer. When it comes to building an email list, I’m going to reach out individually to any of my social media contacts who have engaged with my writing in the past year and ask them to join. In terms of attracting new people into my life who share my interests, I plan to become more active in some of the private Facebook groups created by influencers I follow online. In the real world, I want to start going to more interest-based Meetups, connecting in-person with people who have enjoyed my writing, and maybe even starting a mastermind group.

SMALL WIN #2

The second small win that I had in recent memory came during the VaynerMedia holiday party at City Winery in NYC. While the party was a great chance to have some fun with my team members that I worked so hard with during the year, it was also a chance to catch up with other acquaintances at the company who I don’t necessarily see on a daily basis.

As I struck up casual conversations with some of these folks throughout the night, there were 4 individuals in particular who expressed positive words of encouragement towards me about my writing and social content over the past couple of months. I was blown away. They not only were noticing what I’d been doing but they also had the willingness to speak up and give me positive feedback.

I think this serves as a good reminder for content creators that social engagements aren’t the be-all and end-all. You’ve got to remember that your content is being seen by a larger group than those who interact with it, and can still be having an impact on those people. Hopefully, you’ll continue to create content that resonates with them and convert them from passive observers to active participants in the conversations you’re leading.

SMALL WIN #3

Lastly, a couple of weeks ago, I published a post called How to Live Your Truth: Lessons Learned from Angel Investor Kamal Ravikant. For those of you getting to know me a little bit better, one of things I really like doing with my writing is sharing what I learn from the books I read. In the past couple of years, I’ve become a more avid reader, mainly of the nonfiction / self-help genre. When I read, I always have a pen in hand so I can underline sentences that connect with me and take notes in the margins.

For this particular post, I re-read through my underlines of Ravikant’s book Live Your Truth and culled them down even further to represent the chief directives I took away from the book (think of it as the actionable Cliffnotes). It was not an easy post, as it took longer than normal to assemble as I weaved together various lessons throughout the book. When I shared the post on Twitter, I made sure to tag Kamal’s handle in case anyone wanted to learn more about who he is and on the off chance that he would see it.

While I wasn’t expecting any acknowledgement from Kamal, I was pleasantly surprised when he quoted my tweet about the post, leading to additional social engagement and more importantly the following conversation:

I was beyond humbled. Here’s a writer I’ve grown to admire acknowledging me for a piece of writing that had an impact on him. Wow. Maybe I am meant to be a writer after all. As a next step, I plan to do more of these “lessons learned from books” posts so I can spread the great work my idols are doing in the world. If they acknowledge me, great. If not, I’m at least spreading their message and creating good karma.

Overall, these 3 moments serve as a good reminder that there’s no such thing as an overnight success. You have to trust the process and improve incrementally over time. Through patience and an appreciation of the present, I’m confident you too will be ready to spot these moments and celebrate them on your path to becoming the person you want to be.

What small wins have you had recently?

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