You need 10,000 hours to be an expert at something.
You need 10,000 steps to live a healthy life.
You need a 100% satisfaction rate or review from your clients and buyers to feel valuable.
You need these many ânumbersâ to feel ready before youâre ready.
Itâs the curse of numbers that makes anyone feel like they should have achieved something before they achieve something. Hereâs another number term for you – Catch 22.
Instead of your lucky numerological numbers, this number term shows up and never goes away. Almost like a haunting, you can get rid of the environment you live in, do anything, but all it needs at the end of the day is just sitting with it, dealing with how to go through it and taking action.
You canât be good at something without being good at something, and the process of being good at something is to put in the numbers of effort. You have to put in the reps, simple as that.
But, the allure of getting the end result FAST is what keeps most people from putting in the numbers they need to reach the expertise level.
Numbers can be dazzling on the best of days as a creative person.
But they’re also lies, even if they have some shade of truth behind them.
- 10,000 steps â Yes, 10,000 steps is an awesome goal, but there is unlimited advice on how it is both a lie and a truth, but the general consensus is it’s a good habit. There’s nothing debatable that using energy daily protects your muscles, brain, and so much more.
- 10,000 hours â Know how most people today are launching “stuff” and offers they have no experience in? Where everyone is debating about whether to put in 10,000 hours to make yourself an expert in something or how to even start without a financial reward at the end? There are also people making moves to do that and see what happens first. It’s a catch 22 trying to pretend something you’re not, where you need to work before you land work, and so on.
- 100% reviews â Reviews can be great for social proof, but sometimes excess of anything with synthetic reviews or excess reviews may damage instead of adding to your persuasion and removing believability due to analysis paralysis more than clarity.
- 10,000 steps to recognition â Unlike what the AI bubble taught the world, success and creativity isn’t “generated”. It takes someone 10,000 hours not just for data collection, but to allow their knowledge to permeate through their perspective and bring out something unique. This uniqueness is present inside each and everyone of us, since our interests, skills, desires aren’t exactly the same, no matter how much the powers in the world try to make us all fit in the same box.
Shortcuts never last because anyone can take a shortcut, and when everyone takes a shortcut, it’s no longer a shortcut, but just another road.
Consistency, slow growth to design, make, create what you want in your life, your page is the ultimate growth hack, or the âshortcut no one takesâ.
This is exactly why most people can’t remember the name of ANY GPT-seller or MLM-seller holding on to their rented success for dear life (except with a bad taste in their mouth).
Success isn’t guaranteed through any course, any coach, any THING that can solve ALL your issues and make you rich or 100x creative overnight.
There are steps and there are coaches to guide you along to help you take them, because without action you can sit exactly where you are, with happiness and safety, saying quietly, ‘It is what it is’.
So what even DOES work?
Your efforts combined with time, discipline and in front of eyes can land you in a world of attention. How you use that attention is entirely up to you.
One of my favorite creatives is Justin Blackman, The Brand Voice Expert behind many of the big creators, like Ali Abdaal, Amy Porterfield and more you may already know from your daily life. He’s been a powerful guiding force to me, through a community I joined, and the more I come to know about his mind, the more I respect him!
Imagine writing 100 headlines for 100 days, and making a name for yourself to see exactly how you can train your creative muscle, authority, and build your identity. Where most people think this isn’t a huge deal, writing and decoding what makes people click, buy, and connect isn’t a small feat.
Today, ChatGPT or any number of infinite LLMs can give you any kind of headline, but how do you know if something works, and STAYS?
How do you choose 1 from infinity? Field experience, and testing. Business could be a guessing game, but own your own dime and time.
Can you allow yourself the courage to pick a path, stick with it with absolute belief, test it in the real world and build for yourself? Most people give up by day 7 and day 21, and most people keep stuck on doing things that just donât move their vision forward. Thatâs exactly the problem solving you can build for yourself first, before you try and do it for others.
Fail fast and forward
Imagine having so much information in your hands, you donât know what to do with it. One person says, âstart with servicesâ, âstart with productsâ, someone else could say âstart with blogsâ, or something else. The thing is, there is infinite advice, and the more you consume, the more âinternal conflictâ there is. And as a result, you think you need to start doing it ALL at once. This is perfectionist hell, or beginner hell. Because youâve not done something before, you try to do it in the most perfect way possible, because ego wins over execution anytime.
Itâs quite literally the curse of knowledge and you can get started with solving it by making your effort count.
Most people get stuck in perfectionist hell (guilty), never starting, or not even realizing there’s a way out of the life you’re living, or any stuck phase you may be stuck in.Never making anything, contributing or adding a project to their life or creative interests.
You don’t learn through watching endless courses, you learn through action. Yes, you may need to get a grasp of the concepts first, but the time between your “grasping” and “execution” depends on how fast you can FAIL FIRST.
Make it exist first, create the shittiest landing page, shittiest writing, photography, program, first, change, optimize, and tune after. Ironical, coming from a perfectionist like me, but there are some lessons you learn through pain and trial, and NO ONE can solve them for you. It’s your life, and your rules, with your ability to execute a reward:risk action every single day.
Handholding, spoonfeeding, waiting for the perfect moment is fear of actually doing the thing first. Be as permission-less as your brain and values allow, break the limits of your comfort, and the “rented success” people would vanish when your voice is louder than their âblingâ.
My challenge to anyone reading this, live 7 shitty uncomfortable days, and see how it breaks the life, the vision, the muscles you’re so comfortable maintaining.
And by the process of executing, you’ll explore the gaps in your knowledge, what you need to learn in order to complete the project or the undertaking you’ve taken. Learning forever is another form of procrastination, and no matter how much this message repeats in front of you, sometimes you just have to go through pain to understand it. Because learning takes paing to move you along, not comfort đ
A meaningful project
The most meaningful project we’re assigned is living our life, but most people put this on the backburner like a task in Asana assigned the least priority in order to “survive”. But years can go by, and you may still have not completed anything meaningful, simply because you’ve not planned it, and showed enough courage, willpower and tenacity to complete it, come hell or high water.
But what is life really? The 24 hours you get to fulfil your biological needs and functions? Sure, but life is what you make it!
As pep-talkey this sounds, allow me a second. Up til now, life meant to live on a solid income, build a happy nuclear family, buy a home (calm down millennials), and so much more. But saturation, shortcuts, quick “things” took out the meaning of what it means to live a day out the window and beat it like a bully.
You can scroll your smartphone and never get anything meaningful done, except build the illusion of âlearningâ, or âentertainmentâ.
No ONE can do the thing you want like you, but you can get help. You can delegate, you can automate “runt work.”
- For some, runt work is making content, theyâre too busy scaling, they canât focus on connecting with real people, since itâs all about marketing ânumbersâ. Not audience connection.
- For some the runt work is working on Excel, they might hate the concept of analyzing Big Data and creating automations or tables, and it truly might require automation to crunch such numbers.
- For some the runt work may be graphic design, and not having to go through the âheadacheâ of understanding how colors and hierarchy interact with the human minds in front of them today, not some day in the future or past.
See, data can become meaningless, numbers can become meaningless, but whatâs sure is everyone wants to do work thatâs meaningful. Everyone has their own definitions of runt work, and a marketer saying that marketing is not runt work is 100% true. A web developer saying creating a front end with user experience in mind is not runt work is 100% true. Getting it across to someone who runs a business and everything is runt work except profits is the challenge people need to solve.
Joanna Maciejewska said famously, “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”
Yes, boring tasks have their own space in mindfulness and allow your mind to breathe, but it’s not the only outlet of your life to think. Your output or your productivity isn’t how many AI agents you can add between your idea and execution, it’s how natural you can be to make it feel effortless and a true “professional” or a “master” at what you do.
And one of the best ways to do that today is to build a body of work that is undeniable, a project that gets you in the eyes of people who like it. And one of the ways you can do it by is my friend-coach’s program, Different on Purpose â
https://ankitcreates–prettyflycopy.thrivecart.com/different
Conclusion
Thereâs no shocker, that most people love to get results of their efforts. Numbers can be confusing, and give you an illusion of progress. But knowing the numbers you put into the right efforts with the right lever to push takes skill, experience, and iteration. If everyone was as easy as printing money like governments and financial institutions do, weâd have another talk. For now, these are the numbers you need to believe will get you somewhere and thereâs no 2 thoughts about it. Get it?