How to see real results

Coming out of a trance I had to ask myself, “How long have I been sitting here with my mouth open?”

These are the thoughts that go through your head when watching a good friend of yours, who is also an accomplished pianist, as he calmly spreads his hands all across the keys and sounds fill the atmosphere around you.

“What’s it like to be able to do that?” a friend asked him as we celebrated the performance over a Denny’s dessert later.

But instead of doing the usual, “Oh thanks…I don’t know…no big deal,” false humility we all use when we receive compliments, he actually gave an answer that got the table talking.

“Well when you do something every day for 17 years, there’s a chance you’re going to end up with some skills.”

He brought up a very good point and it made me think of content marketing.

When we work to engage our audience, the biggest challenge is getting started. We read posts on how to succeed, or attend seminars where we learn some great new ideas. But the idea comes from people who already have a huge following.

They are where we want to be. So we can’t relate.

We think, “Yeah but they don’t know what it’s like. These things don’t work when nobody is listening. It’s impossible to get started with no momentum and no following.”

We see the people up there. The people who have made it, and assume they were immediately blessed with a big following and that everything they wrote was shared across the internet.

When we watched my friend develop alien fingers and play the piano for 15 straight minutes, we thought, “He just has a gift. It must be nice.”

But what we didn’t see was our friend at the age of 7 struggling to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

We didn’t see him try to perfect one tiny part of a song for two weeks straight, each night nearly giving up, until finally getting it right.

We didn’t see him obsess over a certain song just for the joy of being able to play it, knowing he’d never play it for anyone else.

We only saw the result. We only saw the end product when everybody is amazed and applauds.

I think Social Media has done this to us. We live in a world of instant gratification and celebrity worship. The only things we see in front of us are picture-perfect images, or flukes that went viral.

But reality doesn’t work that way. To achieve something significant requires steady, daily improvement.

It takes a commitment to a craft, for the sake of doing something you love. It takes cranking out the best blog post you can possibly produce for those 10 people that are going to read it.

If your goal is to have a reach of 10,000 followers or subscribers, or fans in the audience watching your performance, there is only one guaranteed step you are going to have to take to get there.

You have to have 1.

And then you have to have 2. Then you have to have 10.

Stop focusing on the results and start focusing on the process.

Don’t think about where you’re going to end up, but think about being better today than you were yesterday.

If you’re looking for instant results or a quick-fix method, you’re probably going to be looking for a long time.

The only way to achieve something meaningful is to devote yourself to it, and then commit to doing it every day – regardless of the results that follow.