My friend and fellow YouTuber Rahul Pandey just eclipsed the 100k subscriber mark on YouTube.
The occasion is commemorated with a silver play button. I remember when I got mine and how proud I was to hold that award in my hands.
When I saw his LinkedIn post announcing his achievement, I congratulated him, but not for reaching the milestone subscriber number. I congratulated him on the effort that he put in to get there.
Rahul has published over 250 videos over the years. If you’ve ever tried to make a video, much less an informative one that people enjoy watching, you’ll know how much work that is.
I just recently achieved a new subscriber milestone of my own. This email list has eclipsed over 10k subscribers just this week. It's a proud milestone for me.
But the thing I’m the most proud of is the fact that this is the 52 edition of the newsletter. For a whole year I’ve hit the send button on every Wednesday morning, rain or shine.
Output metrics represent outcomes while input metrics represent actions.
Inputs are the only thing you can control. Outputs are by definition outside of your control. So it's best in life to focus on inputs, and to spend less time fixated on outputs.
I hope that the email list grows to 100k and I can get to 1 million subscribers on YouTube. But I can’t control that directly.
What I can control is the quality of what I write and the quantity and quality of the videos I create. I can control how well I market the channel and my personal brand, and so I choose to focus on those things.
And you should too.
90% of podcasts don’t make it past three episodes. To be in the top 1% of all podcasts all you need to do is publish 20 episodes. That is a lot of work, but it's bounded and unambiguous.
While that work doesn’t mean that you’ll have a ton of listeners, I guarantee you that you’d learn a ton about how to produce them and that the quality of the 20th episode will be miles ahead of the quality of the first one.
I encourage you, whatever you want to excel at, to focus on the quality and quantity of inputs.
It’s so easy in today’s day and age to focus on knowledge, and then in rapid succession to obsess about outcomes. But as Naval Ravikant once said on his podcast, if knowledge was the answer, we would all be billionaires with six pack abs.
You can become elite, even with an average intelligence, with sustained effort.
I will write another message when I reach the 104th newsletter. Hopefully by then I’ll have 100k subscribers. But I’ll just be happy if I can put in the reps and publish quality content regularly.
Speaking of Rahul Pandey, I just uploaded an interview that I did last month with him to my Patreon. We spoke about techniques for finding scope in today’s era of contractions in tech, along with some advice on how to get promoted.
Patrons get an archive of previous newsletters, early access to videos, and other goodies. If you’re in a position to help, I would really appreciate your support.
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