Do Something You Are Proud Of

What was the last thing you did inside your business that you were proud of? That should be the goal that we strive for in all of the main activities and tasks surrounding our business. Especially the customer-facing projects.

For example, hopefully, part of your routine weekly is to take some time on Sunday afternoon or Monday morning and schedule social media posts for the week. When you do that, are you doing it with pride? Did you double-check that all the links work and go to the right place? Have you checked to ensure the correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling? With modern tools like Grammarly, most spelling, punctuation, and grammar should be caught.

While those tools don’t catch everything, you should get something you are proud of with a quick reread of your post. How about the look? Do you have images to go along with the posts? This also doesn’t need to take long, and unless you want to, you don’t even need to power up Adobe Photoshop. You can use an online tool like Canva and quickly knock out images for all your social posts. Or maybe a video will get more eyeballs on your post. Again, Canva can help. All you have to do is create one or two graphics, add some text and elements and then use the animation feature, and you can quickly have a 15 to 30-second video that might get better results than a still image.

You are actually getting time back by taking this extra time to create something you are proud of. When you are sloppy and apathetic, the effort you put in will most likely be for nothing. You are more than likely wasting your time even though you saved the 15-30 minutes not adding images or double-checking the post. The effort you can be proud of will much more likely warrant results, and therefore the time spent is a better investment than the time spent just putting something out there.

Lastly, the goal is to put out the effort you can be proud of. The goal is not to be perfect. I have put out many things that I’m incredibly proud of, yet I always find something to improve. That doesn’t mean that I obsess over the improvements, and many times I add them to my master list and then never do anything with it because the effort is reaping the rewards. Do not let the striving for pride in your work become a need for perfectionism. There will be a point of diminishing returns, and to have pride in the effort, you must put it out into the world to achieve it.