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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, my daily active streak for the mobile game Flow is currently 2,161 days, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living.
Kari and I moved into a three bedroom house on 162nd Terrace in 2003. Our daughter, Addison, had been born a few months earlier and we were excited to settle into our new home and raise our family. Kari and I took the master bedroom, obviously, and we set up the nursery in the back bedroom. The front bedroom was set up as an office/music room/guest room with a pullout sofa.
Early the following year we found out baby number two was on the way and we converted that third bedroom over to a nursery for our baby boy, Colby. We created a lot of great memories in that house until we moved into our current house when our kids were almost 7 and 5. We loved a lot of things about that house, but Addi’s room had a special secret. Each year when one of our kids had a birthday, we’d take them into Addi’s room, open up the closet door, and ask them to stand up straight against it. There, like many families do, we’d make a mark denoting their height and age. We all loved seeing how much they’d grown over the last year.
During my time at the bookstore, we had several tools that we used to measure growth. One of the tools I used every day was a book called Beat Yesterday. The Beat Yesterday book was essentially a daily ledger with capacity for tracking six years of sales. It had a spot to input each day’s sales figure, and you could use it to see how that day fared versus its counterpart from years past. We could also easily make a note to indicate if a day had been negatively impacted by bad weather or positively impacted by a new product release or in-store appearance from an author.
In addition to the Beat Yesterday book, we had other things we tracked. Each month we’d receive an in-store audit from the district manager and he’d check our inventory management, adherence to memos, and make sure our merchandising displays were current. Similarly, I had regular interactions with each of my department heads to make sure these things were in order before the district manager arrived, and I’d also keep a regular eye on things like cleanliness, turn, markdowns, and special order management. It’s been said that we manage what we track, and that was certainly true for the store. I knew very well what the corporate office tracked, and I made sure those things were managed well. My team also knew what I tracked, and made sure those things were managed well.
Now that I have my own business, I have things that I regularly track. These are things like monthly revenue, annual revenue, the number of invoices sent each month, average invoice value, podcasts launched each month, active clients, and uncollected revenue.
As this episode is being published, I’m in the process of launching a brand new backend system for my team and my clients that we’ve built from scratch. That tool gives me instant access to these numbers and other things like my lifetime client value and client retention rate. I use all of this data to track information across time and get a picture of how my business is performing.
Here’s what I’ve learned.
I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the importance of taking data over time. Of course, it’s important to avoid wasting time tracking things that don’t matter, so tracking those things that do matter is key.
I think we’ve all been in a situation where either we as kids or when we were older with kids of our own ran into someone that we hadn’t seen in a while. Maybe it was a family member at a reunion or perhaps it was an old friend at the grocery store. Either way, that person looks at the kid and is surprised at how much they’ve grown. Even us as parents can have this experience with our own kids when we look at their first day of school picture versus their last day of school picture. We’re so close to them every day, that we’ve not noticed the small incremental changes that have taken place over time.
From a business point of view this is true too. If we don’t create some mechanism to plot data over the course of time, we might have a false or outdated impression of what has actually happened. I’ve been mostly focusing on growth in my examples, but that’s not always what’s happening. These data points also allow me to see when something negative is happening so that I can dig in and find out how to take corrective action.
These tracking principles that are used in running a successful business are not just applicable in the business realm. From a personal point of view, we can apply these principles in several areas of life. Common examples are weight loss, working out, meal planning, and financial management. For example, if you want to see how your personal workouts are progressing, you have to track your current limits so that you can know when things are improving over time.
If you’re like me, when it comes to the personal side, things can get less disciplined. I’ve found there are two great ways to combat this complacency, and they both have to do with accountability. First, reach out and find an accountability partner. That may be your spouse, a close friend, gym instructor, or financial advisor. Check in with this person on regular intervals. I know that when I have that meeting with my accountability partner on my calendar, it keeps me motivated to stay on task and be disciplined.
The second is to share your goals and progress publicly. This method is not for everyone and it’s somewhat controversial. In our social media age, it’s easy to see people doing various sorts of things and sharing it with the world just to gain social clout. I don’t condone that mindset and motivation at all.
Instead, I’m suggesting sharing publicly what your goals are, and checking in periodically to let your contacts know how it’s going. In this way you are held accountable, and your friends are there cheering you on. I’ve found that when you do this with the right heart and motivation, sometimes something unexpected happens.
You may recall from episode 581 that a few years ago I set out to learn how to beat the original The Legend of Zelda game in under an hour. During that process, I upgraded my Intel-based MacBook for a MacBook Air with Apple’s new M1 chip. One evening I decided to test the system by playing Zelda via an emulator, and live-streaming to Facebook. This is a test that would put quite a bit of strain on lower end Intel MacBooks. Since the new M1 MacBook Air had no cooling fans, I thought it would be a fun test.
I ran the tests several times over a few days and enjoyed chatting with people via Facebook as I streamed and played the game. I shared with the audience about my test and I also shared how I was working on the game to learn how to beat it in under an hour. People cheered me on and seemed to be genuinely happy when I was able to beat a personal record or pull off a difficult time-saving trick.
A couple of months later, I was at a conference and ran into a friend in the hotel lobby. He commented on my Zelda live-streams and told me that his son had been inspired by them. His son had decided to pick up the game and see if he could learn how to beat it quickly too.
Naturally, a huge smile came across my face. Not only had my efforts inspired someone to pick up Zelda, the greatest video game franchise of all time, but it had inspired him to push himself and see how quickly he could beat it. Simply put, by publicly sharing my goals with others, I not only received encouragement from them that helped push me along, but I also helped inspire others to do the same.
I think we all want a tomorrow that is better than today, whether our today is good, bad, or somewhere in between. Fortunately, even though we don’t control everything that can happen in our lives, we certainly control enough to make these types of dreams a reality. So I encourage us all to determine where we want to grow, find a door to track progress, and in doing so, beat yesterday!
I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
I want you to be a part of the next Monday Mailbag coming up later this month on September 30th, with the contribution deadline by end of day on September 25th! Monday Mailbag is your opportunity to Share what YOU’VE learned, so that other listeners and I can learn from YOU. It can be a message as short as 30 seconds or several minutes long. It really doesn’t matter just as long as it’s something that will benefit others. You can send in questions or responses to my SILY episodes, and I’ll respond to them via Monday Mailbag episodes. You can participate in Monday Mailbags by visiting the Golden Spiral Media listener feedback page.