“I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art” by John Baldessari (probably a lie!)
One of the things I keep telling my 30×500 Product Launch Class students is this:
Success is boring.
A Peek into the Success Sausage Factory
Imagine a movie made from my daily biz life over a period few weeks… I guarantee you, the time lapse would bore you to tears. Even with popcorn.
All you’d see is me doing what works. Over and over. Because that’s what it takes to create a success:
Design a live class.
Email your list. Sell seats.
Write a blog post. Sell seats.
Give the class.
Revise the class.
Email your list. Sell seats.
Write a blog post. Sell seats.
And give the class again.
And give the class again.
Take the class and turn it into a self-serve product.
Get people to sign up for the announce list.
Get people to sign up for the announce list.
Get people to sign up for the announce list.
Email your list. Make sales.
Write a blog post. Make sales.
Email your list. Make sales.
Write a blog post. Make sales.
Ship it.
Email them.
Email them.
Rewrite the sales page.
Tweet about it.
Email them.
Email them.
Ask them how they like it.
Make it better.
Email them.
Tweet about it.
This is my life, folks. For serious.
Yawn.
How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall?
Excuse me, how do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.
So. This boringness?
It’s the fact of life for anyone who strives for awesome — the concert pianist, the public speaker, the teacher, the basketball player, the dancer, the painter, the writer, the chemist, the doctor.
Boring is not boring.
It’s system, it’s practice — it’s a game, always trying to out-do yourself, and money is one of the ways you get to keep score. (A particularly fun way.)
For every improvement you make while pracitcing, you get to enjoy the thrill of signups, sales, and emails from happy customers.
Boredom’s the Way to Go
Contrast this to the what the Legends of the Startup Founder Heroes tell us: excitement, thrills, near-death misses… straining, and huffing, and puffing, and not sleeping. Big dreams and bigger dramas. Elation and depression.
Waiting & dreaming of the big payoff.
And almost always, eventually, the failure.
No. Thank. You. I’ll take boredom any day.
Tweet
Hey Amy! Great post! I often lose focus of the most important things that I need to do because I want to try the newest trick or tool in the industry. You’re completely right about grinding it out and doing the hard stuff. It’s all about continually pounding the rock (like football) and eventually reaching the endzone.
Re: losing focus of the important things… So do we all, Eric! So do we all. Just gotta pick ourselves up & shake ourselves out every time we make that mistake. Maybe some day we’ll stop making it
Love it.
I was just musing on something similar today. Pretty much the only thing that’s worked well for me over the years is consistency. In other words, showing up.
By now, some people are probably all, “Well, there’s Naomi again.”. (kidding!)
I just signed up to test out freckle. Looked at it before, but I already had a really simple time tracking tool I’d been using for years (time stamp), so I figured I didn’t need it.
I have to say, I’m really impressed by how simple, yet fun it is. Can’t wait to try it out more.