Absolute consistency
Consistency is easy with instant gratification. You post your content, get immediate likes and positive comments, you keep going. But the people who get ahead are the ones who are absolutely consistent, not just when it feels good.
I’ve experienced this first hand with Interact. Competitors are all around and going strong when the money is flowing and the economy is booming. Then they shrink back when the economy is slow and customers are skeptical of making purchases. Those are the times when we expand our territory and take over new ground.
At Interact we’ve always made it part of our practice to be consistent regardless of the broader economic situation. This means that sometimes our hard work is greeted with explosive growth. And sometime that hard work is met with tepid growth. But either way it’s the same hard work. The core of what we offer doesn’t change much, we don’t make massive pivots to try and capture demand of a changing economy. And that’s because our product has long-term appeal and we chose it purposefully.
If your business is the same. You help people with things like careers, finances, fashion, health, etc. You know those things are always needed. The “last mile” might change over time, meaning that you might position yourself differently in different economic situations, but your core values don’t change. All that to say, if you can focus and stay exactly as consistent when things are slow as when they are fast and giving you dopamine hits, you will get ahead.
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, is huge on this principle. JP Morgan has expanded during slow economic times, over and over again. They stay consistent, and when other banks falter, they expand their territory. But operating in this manner requires a feedback loop outside of just likes and comments.
In order to build up a muscle of consistency that will last through all periods of the economy, you must learn to get value from the improvement of your work. You must learn to wire your brain to feel good by observing yourself improving over time. You read an article you wrote, and it’s so much clearer than something you wrote two years ago. You watch a reel you made and it’s so much more interesting than one you made six months ago. Even if they both have zero likes, you know you are improving.
And I know what you are thinking “Oh, okay Josh, that’s great for you with $3M in revenue so you can afford to make content no one sees, but I am getting started and need to make money.” To which I say, check your ego. Look at Tom Brady, the greatest football player, and arguably the greatest athlete ever to play sports. He was a backup for a full year before he was the starter, he had to work his way from fourth-string. And a year is about the amount of time it took me at Interact to finally break through and make a piece of content that actually drove paying customers.
A year of full-on effort with zero results. That’s what you have to commit to. And by full-on effort I mean you have to be self reflective and honest with yourself about what sucks with your content. You have to have at least three people who will give you the truth about your content so you can improve it. You can’t operate in a vacuum.
It will be the most excruciating year of your professional life unless you’ve started a company before. Most people are used to two week cycles, or maybe month long cycles, after which you get approval and praises from co-workers and managers. You will be on your own, making content, with no approval, for up to a year. Of course it can happen faster, and that would be awesome, but the average is one year.
And I’m not making that up, Seth Godin, the godfather of content marketing, says he will go on any podcast that has 100 episodes. 100 episodes takes at least a year if you are actually giving maximum effort to create that content. So he agrees with the 1-year rule. Why am I telling you all this in the context of absolute consistency? Because if you don’t start off with a year of building the muscle of focusing on improving your content, you won’t have it later when you go through a lull in revenue, which always happens by the way. If you don’t have that muscle established, and revenue comes easy in the beginning, you’ll fail later on, when the stakes are higher, and you have more to lose.
So please, for the love of all that is good, put in your reps. Don’t mess up your life, if you need to keep a job, or do freelance work on the side to support yourself, do that. But put in 1 year of full effort on creating content, where your main focus is improving that content, before you consider yourself established. It will pay dividends for the rest of your entrepreneurial career, and every time there is a slowdown, you will get ahead.
