Don Dalrymple — May 11, 2017 
Are you wasteful with your time?
My clients and friends know that I beat that mantra, “Most things don’t matter.”
One area that this particularly applies to is vanity metrics. These are the stats, conversions or data that simply do not matter or are too cluttered to manage towards the one thing that does matter – results.
Your carefully defined goals are what matters. How much money do you want to make? Are you clear on this?
Who do you want to have a strong relationship with?
Where do you want to live? What work do you want to do on a daily basis?
What activities will make you happy?
Put a number down or a specific person or place for your goals.
The activities you choose to engage in will produce results that either get you closer to these carefully defined goals or simply make you feel better emotionally.
We have to be careful of simple feel goods. You can’t say you want a fit body and feel comfortable running 5 miles, but you spend your time eating donuts and socializing when you should be putting in the work. The results are not related to the goal.
You can’t talk about growing a business with a team and ignore or misjudge each member’s competency because you favor personal likability more.
We have this amazing ability to rationalize our choices and activities and insist on goals we want, regardless of whether those actions are related or not. This is where getting real with yourself, either from someone advising you, or your personal choice to wake up, becomes critical.
You may be feeling good because you see things like:
- Lots of Facebook likes
- Many different social media logins
- Lots of emails in your inbox
- PR in an industry publication
- Hundreds of handshakes at a conference
- Flying all over to meet prospects
Perhaps you have a dashboard and you measure these activities. It feels good to talk about the social connections. How long have you been connecting with this many people, and how many customers have you gained?
What about all that traveling or activity? What did it turn up in business or friendship?
We have a lot of sexy technology that arises in our lives. But does that translate to meaningful results? We can be seduced into thinking that the activity we experience matters, when it does not.
If you are looking at vanity metrics which have no relationship to your goals, then its simply delusional. What you claim you are wanting will not happen. The activities don’t relate to the outcomes.
The better strategy, if you are serious about winning, is to ignore all the hype and do the following:
- Decide that most things don’t matter and are a waste.
- Define clearly what you want. Quantify it.
- Review how you have achieved your desired result in the past. Evaluate whether you can replicate the process.
- Set up a scorecard that measures the activity that contributes to the result.
- Look at the scorecard daily. Keep yourself accountable or have someone that will do the job honestly hold you to your goals.
This takes thought. You have to think it through and get off the high of vanity metrics and get real with yourself. It’s how winning is done.
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