The 20 mile march - Your driver of success

A while ago I listened to a podcast from Entreleadership. Highly recommended for any small business entrepreneur. In it they interviewed Jim Collins about his book Great by Choice. A book that I stil need to read. A concept they zoomed in on was the 20 mile march and how this concept is a driver of success for any business and leads to 10x growth in comparison to competition in the market place.

This 20 mile march concept was inspired by the story from two teams trying to reach the south pole first. The first team was fast. They went as far as they could get on a day. So when te weather was good they would go up to 50 miles, but on bad days with snow storms they decided to wait for better weather. Which meant that after days with good weather they were completely exhausted.

The other team had a much different approach. They knew that winter would come eventually and they needed to make sure to be on the way back way before the winter would hit in full force. So, they calculated that they needed to go 20 miles per day. They did that on good days and on bad days. Even in snow storms they would push themselves to go the 20 miles per day.

The first team got a great head start, but as the weather got worse they did fall behind. Sometimes waiting for better weather for more than a week. Then trying to catch up lost time, they would completely exhaust themselves on a good day. So that when bad weather hit, they would not be able to move anymore and make bad decisions.

The second team pushes themselves on bad days to march for 20 miles and then could take it easy on the good days. Meaning that they would regain strength and they would make good decisions.

The first team got a great headstart, but the second team reached the south pole exactly on the day they had chosen beforehand. Several members of first team died on the journey, while all members of the second team came back alive.

The first team reached the south pole completely exhausted and much later than planned and since they would not move when weather was bad, it was deep into the winter when they were still on the way back home. The second team got back home long before the dark and cold winter could slow them down.

What was the big difference between these two teams? It wasn’t their expertise, or their gear. Both teams had the best and most experienced team members. The difference was the 20 mile march.

Now in business a similar thing happens, where some businesses grow 10 times faster as their competition and they keep doing this year after year after year.. Almost every single time they have some sort of 20-mile-march approach where they will do something regardless of the market circumstances.

Read more about it on the website from Jim Collins: https://www.jimcollins.com/concepts/twenty-mile-march.html

Now, how does this apply to building your business on Hive?

As all of you know, rewards on Hive are distributed through curation. If you don’t get any votes on your posts, then you will not get any rewards. The way to get lots of rewards is by building a following. People that look out for new content that you publish, that they enjoy and reward with their upvotes.

Growing the number of followers is the most reliable way to grow the rewards for your posts. After all, if people don’t even see your post, then they cannot upvote it.

So how do you build your number of followers

1. Write content that people like to read and post it in a community or tribe where there is interest in that topic. Do not post your poems in the Leofinance tribe, they are not interested in poems.
2. Be consistent. Be predictable. People need to know that you will post daily, weekly, monthly in order that they will look for your content. You want them to think “what will he have posted today? I hope it is a gem like yesterday!”
3. Engage with people outside your circle. The best way for people to get to know you is when you make meaningful comments on their posts. Or by engaging in discussion with them on someone else’s post.

How to apply the 20 mile march concept to this?

I’m sure you’ve seen the 3 steps I just mentioned in several posts already. It is no rocket science.

But the fundamental difference between peeled that make it online and people that hopelessly fail is not the way they start, it is the consistent, predictable, daily tasks they do.

You should absolutely have big goals, but you should also translate those goals into simple actions that you can do daily for the next 10 years.

You need to figure out what your 20 mile march is.

What can you keep doing daily, without completely exhausting yourself. If you completely go at it for a week, a month or a quarter and then you find yourself exhausted and no longer able to keep the production up, then you’ve done it wrong.

Hive is no place for getting quick money. This is a place where you build relationships and over time your very consistent 20 mile march will start to compound.

When that snowball starts to really accelerate after a could month’s, quarters, years you will reap the rewards of your consistent 20-mile-march actions.

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For my main account @elbrava, where currently I only post my actifit reports and play dcity, I see that on hive-engine my curation rewards are now higher than my post rewards.

I’m not there yet in terms of hive rewards, but I will get there some day. It is just a matter of time and consistent action, even though it is with the small steps of a daily actifit report.

For this account @invest4free I’m much more active: producing content and engaging with people trying to build relationships. So it grows faster, but here as well I need to find that rhythm of the 20-mile-march. In order for me to be able to keep doing this thing consistently for many years to come.

Since engagement is so critical andi have limited time, I might decide to not publish a post every day, but instead choose to engage more on some days. In the short term this will hurt my income, but in the long run it should do the opposite.

I find really helpful to think about whether or not i can continue to do this the next decade. How about you? What are your goals? And what is your 20-mile-march?

Thanks for reading and let me know what you think about this 20-mile-march approach to growth on hive.