Hippie CEO Life #22 - Deliberate Persistence
September 9, 2022
“Energy and persistence conquer all things.” – Benjamin Franklin.
Regardless if you are listing your first product on Amazon, starting up a weekly newsletter, creating a new team within your organization, or founding a new business, you will mostly likely have an abundance of energy at the very start of your new endeavor but it’s persistence that will ultimately determine your success.
It’s unfair to say that starting is easy but looking around my office, i see stacks of sheet music that i intended to learn but gave up after a day or two because it was “too hard.” i have a collection of boxes representing various projects i was energized to complete from a Raspberry Pi garage door opener to a dormant YouTube channels where i reviewed instant ramen, and many other projects in-between.
And this isn’t all bad, it’s ok to start lots of things to see what sticks but what i have discovered, perhaps it’s Survivorship Bias, is that the projects that i’ve pushed a few inches forward everyday, sometimes for years, are the ones that finally took root.
If you’ve been a longtime reader, you may know that our book, A is for Analytics, very quickly sold out and it took several months to replenish our inventory. In addition to lost sales, we lost the “Buy Box” on Amazon, which adds the Add to Cart and Buy Now buttons to your product listing. As we did not have these buttons, it forced potential buyers to click through a maze of less obvious choices in order to purchase the book — more lost sales 🙁
But rather than throw our hands up in defeat, we decided persistence would ultimately conquer this challenge. But not just any persistence, the persistence needed to be deliberate. We would need a well-thought out plan, a series of steps, each small step unlocking the next step, wherein the summit would be the coveted Buy Box.
Days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into months. Slowly but surely making progress towards our desired outcome, pushing through frustration and fatigue, leveraging our endurance to continue our daily effort of one foot in front of another, until the day finally arrived that we won the Buy Box.
It would have been very easy, and a bit understandable, to give up after our initial energy to win the Buy Box ran out but had we done so, the chances of us achieving our goal would have been incredibly small.
If you have some audacious goal that you want to achieve, first you need the energy to actually get started, next you need deliberate, and focused persistence in order to make that goal a reality. If not, it’s all but guaranteed you will end up with piles and piles of sheet music, and unfinished projects, that never get played.
