I once read an interview with the mulit-talented entertainer Will Smith where he was asked if he were surprised by his success. His response went along the lines of , "I just put my head down and start running. On occassion, I look up and am AMAZED at where I am, but I then put my head back down and get back to running as hard as I can."
Will Smith doesn’t spend a lot of time "measuring" his success. He’s not obsessed with the markers to measure his progress. Instead, he says he tries to define the actions that create success and then he gets down to business PERFORMING those actions.
I used to be obsessed with racking up the "markers" for success and during those days, I was frustrated that my progress was painfully slow. It was almost like the obsessive dieter who gets on the scale four times a day to measure his/her progress. I’d spend more time obsessing about how far I’d come than spending that same amount of time and energy investing in forward motion.
The other day, I got a message from someone congratulating me on my PR 4 on the blog which supports my book Beyond Niche Marketing. Until that gentleman offered me his congratulations, I hadn’t checked the blog’s PR rank. (I assumed it was 0, since it’s barely a year old.) Truly a case of having my head down and running without paying attention to the scoreboard.
This morning, I checked my Technorati ranking for this blog and was pleased with what I saw. Then I started comparing my Technorati to others. Jensense.com by Jennifer Slegg has an AMAZING 1133 authority rank! Mine is only 46. Sigh.
Jennifer’s blog has been around since 2004…. so she’s been running this race with Technorati for a LOT longer than I have been. (By the way, it’s great information if you’re into It’s time for me to put my head back down and quit trying to guage where I am in comparison with everyone else.
As for me, it’s time for me to put my head back down and get back to running the race.
Yet another example of how blogging is indeed like exercise. If you head to the gym and climb on a stairmaster, chances are the person next to you is going to be in better shape than you are. You have two choices: keep climbing on that stairmaster or head home to watch TV on the coach. If you choose to keep returning to the stairmaster, your body WILL change. It won’t happen overnight, but it WILL happen. Keep at it long enough and maybe some day it will be YOU who is intimidating others with your stairmaster stamina. The point is, you’ll never get there sitting on the coach.
