Today’s message: do what works. It’s amazing, but we humans think we’re so intelligent. Yet we do amazingly stupid things all the time. Don’t think I exempt myself, either!
One of the dumbest things we do in life (and this certainly applies to business related activities) is we ignore the principle: “Do What Works”.
A couple of weeks ago I was playing poker at a neighbor’s house and one of the people there I was chewing the fat with runs a very successful retail business. What kind it is doesn’t matter. What’s important is this person started a real estate retail business as well. Which didn’t go so well and eventually he told me he closed it up. So a couple of years wasted, and god knows how much money.
This is because business one was working and even though it wasn’t at all related to business two, it was a matter of wanting to do something new, because he was bored with business one.
His conclusion to me was that he is now sticking to what he’s good at.
Wow. Simple and profound. How much more income would he have generated, how much more stress would he have avoided, how much in financial pain did he incur simply because he didn’t stick to what works.
We all know this is true in the internet marketing works, too. We find something that works, and rather than scaling it, we run off and chase another bright, shiny object. Again, we humans are an amazing species. We’re the only species that is smart enough to be that stupid, if that makes any sense.
I have committed this error in the past as well.
By the way, please don’t take this to mean that once you find something that works, you should never try anything different. There are some nuances here. But if you have been SEARCHING for something that works and you finally find it, what I would suggest is to at LEAST scale it to the point where you are totally happy with the results you are getting from that one activity. After all, if it works, it will work even better if you scale it.
Then, once you are at least satisfied with the results, you can try new things if you wish. But what do most of us do? Well, if we are lucky enough to find something that starts to work, we immediately start looking for other things and quickly bite off more than we can chew. And, unfortunately, a lot of those other things do NOT work, so now we are taking away time, energy, and focus from the thing that was working, which diminishes the results we were getting from that and we lose time, effort and money on the things that weren’t even proven yet.
So, I don’t care if it comes to dieting, or income producing, or anything else in your life. Make a vow that when you find what works for you, stick with it until you are least somewhat satisfied with your results before even considering anything else!
