Entrepreneurship | 4 Min Read
#20 - Is Perseverance the Key?
After achieving a milestone on social media, this week I spend some time reflecting on the power of perseverance in achieving our goals and dreams.
Hey Friends 👋
I hope you're doing well? This week after hitting something of a milestone on Twitter I wanted to take a moment to reflect and think about the power of perseverance.
We're always told if we want to achieve our goals then we need to push ourselves and persevere for the long run. And, on the surface, I agree with this but I think it goes deeper. It's not as simple as just turning up, putting the work in, going home and repeating for several weeks, months or years.
In some cases maybe, but in most no. I don't think this is enough, there's something more to it than just preserving, no matter how much we tell ourselves.
I'll come back to why I believe this in a moment. But, first, I wanted to touch on the milestone I mentioned earlier. The milestone is passing 10k tweets on Twitter.
I know right, big woop there are probably thousands if not millions of accounts with a similar number of tweets if not more. But, at least in the Tech Twitter world which is where I'm focused, there's a belief that the more you persevere, the more you tweet, the larger your account will be.
But, yet you can see accounts pop up and after a month or two with barely a thousand tweets they have 10k+ followers, how can this be? Given the time frame, it's not perseverance so it has to be something else.
And, this is why I only believe the earlier statement on the surface, achieving our goals and "success" is only partially driven by perseverance. It's persevering with the right thing that makes the difference.
To carry on the Twitter theme of this newsletter thus far, if your goal is to grow an audience and build a community then tweeting every day for 6 months isn't enough on its own. You need to be tweeting the right things every day for 6 months.
This distinction is what I believe is often missed out when perseverance is credited for people's success, it's not doing something for a long time, it's doing the right thing for a long time.
Now, the natural question to ask is how do you know what the right thing is?
Of course, this is heavily dependent on what your goals are. But, I think there is one thing we can do in any situation to determine what the right things to persevere with are within that context.
Before we pick what to commit to, we need to experiment.
Experimenting is key. We can test different theories and ideas as well as test them against each other to measure their performance. After we test our ideas and have collected the data we can review and eliminate the bad ones, then repeat the experiments, see what did well and eliminate the bad ones again.
Eventually, after a period of trial and error, we should have a list of our top two/three actions that yielded the best progress towards achieving our goals. These are the ones we should persevere with, we know they work and have performed so if we stick with those behaviours they should give us the best possible chance at success.
But, a key thing to note is to never stop measuring and experimenting. Once you have your initial set of actions to stick with, use them but every now and again through a new idea into the mix and see how it performs, if it performs well, keep it.
Our goals change, our ideas change and our tools change so it only makes sense that our actions change as well.
Just because something works well now, doesn't mean it will still work well in a year. As we mentioned earlier, persevering only works if it's with the right things so once something isn't working anymore and we have the data to back it, drop it and find something else that does work for your goal(s).
What are you currently persevering on? Drop a reply to this email and let me know, I'd love to hear what it is. 😊
As always, thank you for reading and see you next week.
Coner x
Thought, Question, Challenge 🤔
- Thought: The smallest of changes can have the largest of impacts.
- Question: If you could only do one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be? How could you take steps to make it a reality?
- Challenge: Take the first step towards achieving your goal. E.g. If it's writing a book, write for 5 minutes every day this week. Work out the smallest step you can take towards your goal and take it this week.
Favourite Things 😍
- Newsletter ✉ - 3,2,1 by James Clear
- Product 📚 - Medium Guide by Niharikaa Kaur Sodhi
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