No Target, No Hit
A robot standing against a brick wall with a target painted on it, drawn by Stable Diffusion

No Target, No Hit

One part of learning every day (one of #my3words for 2024 is "fusion" which is about learning and then applying it as soon as possible) is that sometimes, I have to be satisfied that I might not learn a lot of useful things on any given day. But if I set the target to be "at least one useful learning per day," then I work harder to hit that instead of accepting that maybe today's just the day I won't learn something applicable.

If I don't aim, I won't hit the target.

Inflated Ambition

I think one challenge we all go through at the beginning of any given year is that we set too many goals. We throw targets up all around.

Colorfully splash-painted dartboards like you'd use in a pub, but very bright primary colors all over the place. Drawn by Stable Diffusion.

I'm going the other route. I'm looking at compound interest. If I learn this, then this, then this other thing, I can now use all three learnings to form a union of information that might unlock even better ideas and information.

So if you aim at nothing, you hit nothing. If you aim at everything, you risk hitting nothing for lack of focus.

And here is the third thought about aiming. This is a clip from American Sniper about the legendary US Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle, played here by Bradley Cooper:

Aim small, miss small.

This is what I've come to understand better from my daily learning. I take precise learnings where I can get them. I don't want to learn all about a topic. I want to learn more about a topic. I want to pursue little details. That's been a significant difference for me.

I'm discovering that when I aim a bit more precisely, I learn a detail I might have let zip past me. I found out that all the smart content creators on YouTube use every one of their YouTube Shorts to point back to whatever piece of content they're trying to promote the most at any given time. So, if I have eight YouTube short videos, I should make all of them link back to my most recent piece of long form content, if I hope to earn even more attention to that piece.

A very little detail. Easy to miss. But I was aiming small.

Work Targets, Given or Self-Produced

At work, some of our goals are big and can feel vast. I see that some people naturally think to create their own targets within the larger goal. We might want to make x thousand more leads, but maybe that means we want to get six lead generation events put together. Then aim even smaller. For every one of those events, aim to get 20% of the work done in a day that sets in motion the rest of the work. Or whatever. (I'm making the example up.)

But maybe the worst choice is to accept that there's no target because none was given. YOU can produce a target to aim at, even if it's not something official. Just as I've said above, if you aim at nothing, you'll hit nothing. Why would this be any different?

See where I'm going?

What are you aiming at?

Chris...

Mark Ellis

Helping Business Coaches Attract More Clients with AI-Powered Copywriting

1 年

Man, you are so right about this. Most of us are wandering generalities and don't realize it. You've pretty much summed up my existence. I don't have any targets and seem to merely float from one task to the other. Is there a resource that you can point to that would help someone like me overcome this? I know there are probably a lot of them out there, but is there a book or video that really nails down a way to set up your life in a more productive manner? Thanks for pointing this out. God Bless!

回复
Katy Baker

Pricing Consultant - helping entrepreneurs price and plan for profit

1 年

YES! Terrific article!! I work with entrepreneurs on their pricing. It’s one detail that needs to be extracted from a vast amount of data. The small details I aim to uncover are key and make all the difference when the goal is profitability.

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