Distance, Velocity and Acceleration – The mechanics and formulas of motion seem to exist solely within the physical world, so let’s apply them to Internet marketing.
What on earth has this got to do with how successful you are at Internet marketing?
Well, these mechanics exist within this abstract world too. So put your differences aside and consider whether you are suffering from the worst possible fault, that you can ever suffer from, in accelerating towards your goals.
The Spinning Wheel…
To make progress in any endeavour, to move from your situation to a new one you exert energy. Scientifically precise the more energy you put into your goals the more progress you should make.
But are you making progress? Or are you in fact, like I personally discovered, slipping backwards?
Picture a road, one that leads to many places, some good, some bad, but essentially one you are free to travel all throughout your life. Your destination, at any particular time should be where you steer towards shouldn’t it? As long as you are putting effort into it, you should be making progress.
But the road is one of actions taken. It is the physical contact to the vehicle you are driving, essentially you, and the world that surrounds you. Any progress along it is in very small steps completed in the direction they are aimed at.
Firstly, you may consider yourself fortunate, you are actually ‘driving’ the vehicle, you are completely aware of the things you want, the direction in which you life needs to go. You are better than all those that go around the roads unconsciously drifting through life, never knowing what they want and therefore never really achieving anything.
You are in control, you put effort in moving forward.
But maybe you do not seem to be making any progress, the destination you seek doesn’t seem to be getting any closer. You notice that over time you are putting more and more work into achieving this and dreaming of arriving at this place in the road but in fact something worse is happening – you are going backwards.
Welcome to one of the biggest problems of the modern world.
The Spinning Wheel…
Even though you are ultimately directed to your goal you exist on the road solely connected to this one problem. Preventing you from moving forward. In fact causing you to go backwards.
What is going on? Round and round we go, we find a new idea, our enthusiasm grows, we learn, we work hard to keep that wheel turning, we reach the peak, we have built up our potential, we essentially understand the idea and work towards it. We don’t get the results we expect, our enthusiasm falls, the kinetic energy keeps the wheel turning but we are on the decline. It didn’t work, our effort seems to have been wasted. We looked to find out why? As we fall, our energy seems devoted on finding solutions again, if it isn’t on why our last project failed it is on the search for new ones. We reach the bottom on the cycle. Somewhere along this path, this direction we find a new idea, a new direction is created.
Round and round we go … never quite making contact with our desired road. The harder we work, the more the wheel spins. It is exhausting, the friction created by your effort means we have loads of projects left undone. All these small actions in slightly different directions marking our progress but at each turn of the wheel we are losing the benefit of our work. Maybe our drives get full of ideas and half worked on projects. Maybe we have loads of scraps of paper, full of attention of the moment there where created, fully detailed bits of information spread all over the place.
But they do not connect…
Your actual work is getting lost…
Without the driver making any progress you can guarantee that the only movement that takes place on the road is now backwards.
Why?
Because we need to live, we need to pay our way, we need to go forward. The road is sloped in this world and behind us made longer as we fall into credit. The problem is this road goes back to a cliff, the decline, the gradient gets stepper and steeper as we fall back. There is a point we you will crash if you do not make progress. You will fall back faster and faster until the road runs out … What then?…
Why is this happening?
You are not lazy are you? In fact you have been working hard at this and you still haven’t managed to move forward. You might in fact feel exhausted, your energy used up in wasted time.
You are not stupid are you? In fact you have learned so much, accomplished so many skills along the way, so why is this still happening?
Why a spinning wheel is exactly the metaphor that describes the learning cycle that catches even the sharpest, most intelligent of us. This is why I called it the modern road. Information coming at you from all directions showing you what you must do, even using up your resources just in the desire to get hold of it.
Remember, the only progress along the road is through completed action.
These actions must be added together. If they are in different directions then the progress is diminished. For those of a scientific mind know that adding two vectors together will always give a scalar result less than sum of them. If your effort is in different directions then your result is less, OK, Why then am I still going backwards?
These actions must follow on from each other. This is probably the biggest breaking point, the biggest fault and the most subtle.
Remember it is the completed action that you need. Learning is only a spin of the wheel.
If the wheel turns then it is OK, you are learning anyway. But if you are not using what you learned, if you are not actually producing anything and completing the action that makes progress on the road then you are not moving at all.
Actions need to added together, compounded, towards the things that need to be completed to achieve your goal.
Out of this comes a few lessons.
- No progress is made if you do not take action.
- More progress can be made if your actions are all heading in the same direction.
- Progress can be lost if you never use anything you have work on.
- Learn never to do something that can never be used later.
- Make sure you make use of everything you have done and not waste it.
- Learning is better if it is done while your are producing something.
… and finally …
The ultimate fate of the spinning wheel is … bankruptcy…