How Much Effort Should You Really Be Making?

You’re wrong about how much effort you should be making and it’s holding you back.

It’s also making you think you suck, which simply isn’t true.

SO MUCH WRONG.

Let me explain – and tell you how to fix it.

When it comes to persuading people to take the actions you want (like buying your lovely thing,) you think you know how much effort and time is “enough.”

In other words, you think you know when to quit.

But you don’t.

I see this sometimes with clients. We work on their pitch email, for example, and they leave our session feeling full of purpose and enthusiasm.

A week later I get a forlorn email saying “Feeling a bit low. I sent my pitch to three stores. Haven’t heard anything back yet.”

Well, of course you haven’t.

It’s been a week and it was three stores.

But what might happen if you sent that pitch (personalised to each individual retailer) to five stores every week for the next three months?

The odds are that someone, maybe several someones, will say “Yes!”

It works in other areas too. Instead of sending two newsletters to your mailing list this year, what if you sent fifty-two?

Instead of creating one blog post a month, what if you wrote and shared four?

Your results would be different, right?

Pamela Slim calls this the 20x rule. It means assuming that it’ll take twenty times more outreach and effort to meet your goal than you think it should.

Because, really, how the heck could you even know?

You’re not your customer.

You can’t use other people’s results as a guide because their situation is fundamentally different to yours.

And you’ve probably never done this before.

So how could you magically just know what’s enough?

You can’t. So accept it.

Expect things to take much longer, and be more effortful, than you think they should be…and do them anyway.

If you do, get ready to hear “Yes!” a lot more often next year.