Just enough to keep going

Charming or terrifying? Yes. (John Margolies, 1977. Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

I wouldn’t have started this blog if I didn’t find it intrinsically valuable to spend the time writing.

That said, I’m not sure if I would have continued the blog if nobody read it.

But I want to be clear: I’m defining “nobody” as nobody. Not a single person.

Not like the teenager saying “nobody likes me” when they really mean that nobody popular pays attention to them.

If even one person reads my work and likes it, that is enough. Because now I’m not just writing — I’m communicating and connecting.

Believing that wholeheartedly is what has kept me going all these years, happy to share with my small audience.

Where there is one, there can someday be two. And I don’t take any of them (you) for granted.

Of course, every endeavor has a different threshold. Netflix doesn’t work with one subscriber. A nation with only one taxpayer is going to have trouble maintaining its infrastructure. An audience of one on opening night, no matter how enthusiastic, will be disheartening for the performers on stage.

And just one interested customer might not be an adequate user base to justify manufacturing your product.

We each have to figure this out for ourselves. The popularity part might be a distraction, or it might be valid.

When I launched my business strategy group, I needed to have at least three participants. With less than three, it’s really not a group, is it? I ended up with six, but I would have been genuinely pleased with three.

I purposely did not create a program that would have required fifty people to be considered a success. That’s not right for me at this stage of my career.

On the other hand, my music school, Eclectic Music, needs to sell about 130 camps this summer to break even, and each week needs to have at least 6 kids and no more than 30. It’s a potential chicken-and-egg problem that we are able to overcome because we have a decent mailing list, have been running camps since 2009, and spend $10,000 each year on advertising.

On the other, other hand, I closed the Little Middle School in part because the dance of staffing and enrollment became too risky. It was one thing to pay myself to work in the business, but when the entire payroll went to others, I had no margin to make low Covid-era enrollment numbers work and no budget for marketing to fix that problem. For nine years, we had just enough to keep going, and then we didn’t.

How do you know whether your investment is going to pay off? You can’t always. But you can decide what your success criteria are along the way, and you can choose the points at which you will reevaluate.

Having an agreement like that with yourself can strengthen your confidence and prevent you from going over the same ground (“Should I stick with this or quit?”) again and again.

If you are not seeing any movement as a result of your efforts — if, day after day, your tweets don’t get retweeted and your website gets no visits — it might be time to change it up.

But it can also be time to change it up if things are apparently going well. For some people, not even massive success is enough for them to be willing to keep going. Our choices about what to put our time and energy into are based on our own values, not our popularity, wealth, or the potential of a given project.

Whether you continue on your path or not is always up to you. You’re not necessarily foolish to stay with something that hasn’t paid off yet, and neither are you unwise to let go of something that is attracting positive attention. You decide what you require in order to keep going and what will make you want to move on.

Either way, whatever you’re looking for, I hope you find it.