For once, the aggregate of blog posts on my radar today all pointed to one thing: the secret of success. Some posts argue there is one, some that there isn’t – but here are a few that stood out as being worth reading.
There Is No Secret Sauce – Christopher S Penn
I love Penn’s writing style – his analytical approach marries well with the no-nonsense information he passes on. Lesson here? There is no one secret, nothing that will allow you to skip doing your work thoroughly and well.
How to Stop Grinding, or Why Finding Your rhythm Matters – Box of Crayons blog
I don’t read Box of Crayons – or, didn’t. I do now, after this. Mark Dykeman (of Broadcasting Brain and Thoughtwrestling) shared this on Google Reader, and I’m hooked. The lesson here? Grinding is useful for some people, but finding a rhythm is better. Grinding can be a rhythm, but not all rhythms feel like a grind. Ambiguous, I know, but important.
Analyzing the Value of a Blog Post – Amber Naslund, Altitude Branding blog
We talked about this on #blogchat on Sunday – this kind of overarching attention to metrics is something I think bloggers, in general, need to be paying attention to. Easy numbers they’re not, but sobering, solid, and stable. Three pillars to appropriate ROI calculation.
Online Marketing Still A Faith Based Initiative. Why? What’s The Fix? – Avinash Kaushik, Occam’s Razor
What can I say? It’s Avinash. Once again, Our Good Saint of The Measure does his level best to make sure we can not only appreciate the numbers, but back up our hard work with measurable data. Enough religion – let’s filter online marketing through physics instead.
There Will Be Blood – Mitch Joel, Six Pixels of Separation Blog
Mitch really focuses on Avinash’s post here, but I think his comments are valid to the aggregate; being passionate about work is something so rare it could almost be called a portion of secret sauce. It’s the missing piece of many a public-facing tripod that leaves the structure falling down.
So what can we take from these posts? A lot of things. I saw that there’s simply no substitute for hard, quality, meaningful work. However, hard meaningful, good quality work can and must be measured, in order be separated from the chaff of the thrashing we do in other times. The thrash cannot be quantified. But the benefit of passionate, productive activity always can. If we can just find the means with which to measure it.