While investing in businesses, show up, do the work, contribute, be patient.
roughly doubling each year since I started writing in October 2017
Inspired by Seth Godin’s practice of daily posting, I started the same practice back in October 2017. Since then, I have showed up every day, writing something around the broad theme of #OpenLeadership every day. Over time, more and more people find the site, with site traffic approximately doubling each year since I started. Such exponential maths is quite powerful, with around eight times as many people seeing the site compared to the first few months. In addition, I cross-post daily to Medium and that traffic alone is higher than for those visiting my site. If you prefer Medium, you can follow https://tommccallum.medium.com/. (oh, and note Seth’s comment below about “own your assets”, the posts are all hosted on my site, only crossposted to Medium and linked to from LinkedIn and Twitter).
My point, aligned with Seth’s, is that there is power in patience and consistency. It is valuable to build a firm foundation and then see what are building rise up over time, patiently.
This can relate to writing and other content (as per Seth’s article curated below), but it also relates to leadership, culture, vision, purpose. For a terrific example of the value of that patience, watch or listen to my recent #WhatComesNextLive show with Pat Kramer, CEO of BDO Canada. Pat reflects on years of building foundations that allowed the firm to make it through the 2020 Covid uncertainty and be thriving and ready for 2021.
This can also relate to investing in businesses. Show up, do the work, contribute, be patient. As Warren Buffett says: “Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
Show up and contribute.
Over to you, Mr Godin:
Chasing the cool kids
Quick! Get on Myspace, it’s where all the good stuff is. Wait! Better build your following on Facebook. It’s a land rush and once you amass enough followers… And Pinterest. Definitely. What’s your Twitter handle? Will you be live tweeting the presentations at SXSW? Let’s get your show on Quibi… Build an Insta and a Finsta…Did you see how much they’re making on Substack?! Blogs are dead.
The urgent advice usually ends with “blogs are dead.”
Like Groundhog Day, we keep repeating the same pattern.
Any platform that’s reasonably open has a long tail. That means that a few people get most of the traffic and most people get very little. If there’s money involved, that’s definitely what happens.
Statistically, whatever you build online isn’t going to get a lot of traffic. There are no magic shortcuts in open systems, because the short head depends on scarcity.
By the time you show up to chase the cool kids, it’s probably too late to guarantee a sinecure.
What’s the alternative?
Publish. Consistently. With patience. Own your assets. Don’t let a middleman be your landlord. Yell at Google for blocking your emails and hope it’ll work eventually. Continually push for RSS and an open web. With patience.
Getting picked is great, when it works. Someone needs to be in the spotlight and it might as well be you.
In the meantime, catch your breath, show up and contribute.
It all adds up.