Perseverance, Success and The Domino Effect.

This post will look at perseverance, success and the domino effect, but first an explanation.

Last year my strategy was to publish two posts a week. I did that from May to November only missing a handful of scheduled posting dates. Comments on those posts, shares, retweets and mentions in social media tell me that most of them had some value for readers.

I am not convinced they all did. I know that a few were not up to standard because at times, I was more committed to the schedule than creating valuable content.

I originally started blogging back in 2010 after my heart attack because most of the experts preached blogging as the foundation for an internet marketing business. That’s how this blog’s predecessor started.

I enjoy writing, most times creating posts is an act of pleasure. However, trying to meet a two posts a week schedule for something that does not generate much income, more a hobby than a business, can be frustrating. Especially since my speaking and other activities have increased.

This has been in my mind since I found it difficult to keep to the schedule in December when I was involved in the corn harvest.

A recent newsletter from Chris Brogan where he wrote this:

 There’s nothing less helpful than something you wrote or recorded just to fill space. The moment you look at your blogging, newsletter, podcasting, or whatever as a chore, it’s going to shine through in what you create. “7 Tips for Keeping Nose Hair In Line” just really isn’t all that useful to most people.

Made it clear that I needed to change my approach.

I continue to ruthlessly prune my own newsletter subscriptions, I have no wish to add to your burden of email by delivering posts that are not useful.

So I am not going to continue.

Most weeks there will be at least one post, some weeks two, occasionally none. The posts will still be emailed on Fridays. I will try to give valuable content in every post

For more daily doses of wisdom on content creation and taking ownership, visit the OMFG page. (affiliate link).

Now on to Perseverance, Success and Dominos.

Another of the emails that has survived my pruning is Brian Johnson’s “The Optimizer”. In this morning’s issue, he quoted an element of the Domino Effect that I had not heard before.

He wrote that a falling domino has the force to knock over a neighbouring domino that is 50% larger than itself. That domino will in turn knock over one 50% larger.

Brian used this as an analogy to breaking down goals into small increments and focusing all your energy on that one step. Then using the momentum of achieving that goal to move to the next.

I thought it was a good analogy, but I wanted to verify the physics behind it before I quoted it here.

A quick Google search led me to this video by Stephen Morris on You Tube.

It turns out that a falling domino has enough energy to knock over a domino one and a half times its size, not just half as big again. Starting with a domino of fingernail size, the 29th in a series would be as tall as the Empire State building.

Even if we had a daily improvement of only a tenth, the compounding effect over a period would see us reaching huge goals.

But all most of us can focus on is the enormity of the big goal, the obstacles in the way. The thought that it will take forever to meet.

Instead of persevering, one step, one increment, one domino at a time.

How do you look at the dominoes? Do you focus all of your energy on the next one? Or do you get overwhelmed by the size of the final one, the big goal?

Leave a comment, share your thoughts.

Domino photo via Wikipedia Creative Commons