Focus on the inputs

Every time I check the stats of this blog, I get a sinking feeling as I look at the numbers. Perhaps the number of subscribers went down after my most recent post. Or perhaps the open rate was worse than in previous emails. All of these numbers have a negative effect on my mood and feelings towards writing, yet they all share one similarity - they are all outputs.

Outputs don’t always need to be numbers. Perhaps it’s the sinking feeling you get when sitting in the first college lecture on computer science and seeing all your classmates immediately understand concepts that you just cannot seem to grasp.

These outputs could be a result of randomness. Perhaps my most recent unsubscribers were in a bad mood and perhaps you lost out in the computer science aptitude lottery. Of course, these could be true, but an alternate plausible explanation is that I’m not yet a good writer and you don’t yet excel at computer science.

What we don’t see in comparing outputs is the inputs that went into said output. Ultimately, when someone unsubscribes to my blog, they are implicitly signaling that my blog is less good than the other blogs they read. The sad truth is that this very likely might be true! After all, I’ve spent less time writing blog posts than most bloggers have.

What has helped me recently is focusing on the inputs. Instead of looking at open rates, I look at how many posts I’ve written. Instead of looking at the number of subscribers, I try to find bloggers I admire and take time to really dissect what makes their writing great.

This method of focusing on inputs prevents me from getting distracted from my ultimate goal: becoming better at writing. The biggest risk to my goal is not my subscribers going to zero; the biggest risk is giving up on writing altogether.

I started learning a foreign language a year ago. When I began, I had 10 flash cards and could only recall 10% of them in every review session. Today, I have over 700 flash cards and can consistently recall 70+% of them in review sessions. Had I focused on how poor my original 10% number was, I might have given up and never learned the language to the extent I have today.

If you find yourself regularly feeling down about your outputs, I encourage you to start focusing on the inputs instead.