Being Excellent And Not Perfect

I have a confession to make. I’m a stickler for details, everything has to be in the right place, everything has to be in the right order before I actually do anything. You can see how this is not very useful sometimes. There are so many times where I’ve attempted to start something but because I felt that I didn’t know enough about it, I wouldn’t take action.

You can be sure Adam has scolded me before about this. I’m bringing this up because I feel it’s very relevant in internet marketing especially for those without any basic web design skills. Like me.

My first brush with doing anything online was when my friends and I had an idea to do a football matchmaking website for all the amateur teams in Singapore. We hired a web developer and I took charge of the project. My developer must have wanted to strangle me many times because of the insane amount of times I kept on changing the designs.

At first I wanted the page to do this and look this way, but halfway through the making, I would add even more stuff or change things around and my developer would have to start all over again. It was fustrating! I kept on wanting my website to be absolutely perfect and I would pick on every nitty-gritty detail till my developer went mad! (Of course he was nice about the whole thing, but I can feel his pain.)

Eventually the whole website was done and it was good to go. But then� I went� through the whole thing again and I decided to redo the entire thing again, almost from scratch! I must have gone stark mad! So we redid the whole thing and this time, I was pretty satisfied (costs were burning too ) but you know what? In the end, the whole idea was a failure.

Instead of getting the website up and running and letting it evolve as it grew, I wanted it to be a full-blown Optimus Prime version before it even started! And it sunk like a ton of bricks.

You can take a look at it if you wish (www.challengefootball.com) but I keep it there to serve myself a reminder of the many, many mistakes I made in my first foray online. But maybe I should take it off, I have to pay hosting…

So if there’s a big lesson I learnt it’s about being excellent and not perfect. Now when I go about doing mine and Adam’s websites and the other online marketing tactics, I really just focus on getting them done first before I even think of getting it right the first time around. Because if I did, I would have gotten nowhere.

And I feel it could be the same with alot of people out there just starting out in IM. If you’re always focused on making things perfect the first time you do something, it’s gonna be real tough because you’re just gonna be paralysed by the information you don’t know or have.

I found the moment I allowed myself to make mistakes and screw up, I learnt alot faster and my progress jumped by leaps and bounds. I didn’t know html, ftp, rss and all that jazz and even now I only know the basics of it. But it hasn’t prevented me from starting my IM business, launching websites and making real money.

So if someone like Adam has the faith to trust a beginner like me in running his online efforts, I’m sure you can do the same for yourself. Because it’s not where you are now that matters, it’s how you move forwards and where you end up that counts.