Massive action is one of the almost unspoken keys to success.
A friend of mine, David Hyner, has interviewed countless successful people in a multitude of different areas of success (business, sport, even politics) and the thing they share in common is taking massive action on their goals.
Which translates to success – because they’ve done so much it’s almost impossible not to succeed.
Just recently, Sean Mize did an experiment that definitely counts as massive action…
He set out to write 10 articles, create 10 slide shares, create 10 Pinterests and record 10 YouTube videos in the space of 4 hours.
You can read how well he did here.
Or – the spoiler – he didn’t quite make it.
But he still created more content in that 4 hour period than most people do in a week.
Most people would be happy with an article or two a day.
There’s nothing wrong with that – done consistently, it builds up nicely.
My own target (which I don’t always hit) is 5 pieces of content per day, spread across my site and other places.
Which means that in the space of a week, if I hit my target, I’d almost reach the quantity Sean was planning to do in half a working day.
OK, he probably wouldn’t do a full working day at that rate – there’s a burnout in this process if you work that intensely – but if he did that Monday to Friday for a month and hit the target because he didn’t let himself get distracted by emails that would work out at 200 pieces of content per week or 800 in a month.
Equivalent to half a year for me if I hit the 5 items a day target seven days a week.
Spot the difference?
For me, if I could hit that pace, I could have the dream 4 Hour Work Week and create more in those 4 hours than I currently do in a week (excluding all the other things I do such as create products, work on computer programs and all sorts of other weird and wonderful stuff).
Food for thought.
You’re probably wondering what the catch is with Sean?
And, yes, there is a bit of a catch.
He’s not creating 40 unique pieces of content in those 4 hours.
That is do-able for articles if you use speech recognition software but he hammers the keyboard the same as I do. You’d need to be able to type at around 70 words a minute to achieve that – actually not impossible, it’s not unheard of for touch typists to reach 100 words a minute.
What he’s doing is working smarter as well as harder.
The basic aim was 10 articles – he actually created 11, so he over-achieved on that.
Then take turn each one into a document and upload it to SlideShare.
Sean does this by creating a PowerPoint style presentation with each “slide” part of the article. He uses the Mac equivalent but you could use the free OpenOffice/LibreOffice software if you wanted to go down that route.
Personally, I used to find creating PowerPoint presentations overkill although I’m getting more proficient at them.
But before, I’d just open up a word processor, copy in the text, format it with a nice font and insert page breaks at appropriate places. A lot easier and it works just the same. Plus I can add a footer on every page with a link back to my site.
The document sharing sites work fine with word processed documents and process them quite happily.
The next step – which I’ve not done personally – is to take a snapshot image and pin that on Pinterest. Should be easy enough and Sean has a video of how he’s done that so you can follow along.
The fourth and final step – which I’ve done quite a lot now – is make a video.
If you’ve not got screen capture software then I’d suggest Screencast-o-matic. It’s very affordable and does everything you’re likely to want to do.
Open the document you’ve used for the document sharing sites, press Record and start reading the document.
When I do this, I press pause while I move from screen to screen. On a PowerPoint style presentation you’d be able to move from slide to slide without doing that.
Then upload to YouTube once the video has processed.
Simple.
The whole process turns one piece of content – the original article – into 4 pieces, scattered around the web in different formats.
Highly productive and very effective.
And – back to the massive goals side of things – aim high.
Don’t think “Oh, I’ll try one and see what happens.”
Set aside some time – if it’s an hour and you’re not a brilliantly fast typist then your target is 2 articles (one if you’re really slow!) posted on your site or elsewhere, turned into Pins, documents (and uploaded at the appropriate site) and videos.
Go on!
I challenge you!
And report your results below.
I didn’t set the clock going yesterday but I did manage 11 pieces of content with this method. More than double my regular target, so I’m happy.
And I know I’ll speed up with time.
So will you when you put this into action!
And if you’d like to know more about how to make your content work really hard without much effort from you, check this out.