The other day I mentioned I was taking a week off to update and clean out my entire contacts list. My friends mentioned to me that it didn’t need to be done, but I had a bad experience a few weeks ago when I left someone’s business card in my studio, and so I had no way of getting in touch with them one night we had plans to connect. Some contacts were on cards, some in Gmail, some written on paper – and I realized I was a mess. It only takes one bad experience to change me.
So I overhauled my entire contact directory, a huge week-long task, and it’s already paid off.
It reminded me of when something similar happened about 2 years ago: I had a client that needed a music file of mine ASAP. But there was one problem – after hours of searching I couldn’t find it. It made me look bad, destroyed my entire day of work, and cost me the gig. But I realized it was my fault – I brought it upon myself. I was unorganized, and my files weren’t named properly and maintained. How was my business to grow? It was a wake up call.
So I took off an entire month and gutted all my hard drives, destroyed the duplicates, renamed every file, organized them into folders, gave them tags, and more.
The task was monstrous – over 400 gigabytes worth of data – everything from my music library, to my studio work, photos, videos, YouTube updates, projects, website database, and the list kept on growing. I lost a month of business, but from that day on I’ve been extremely productive, organized, and dependable.
It’s never easy to take a step backward and put everything on hold, especially when I promised myself I would blog daily, video podcast daily, release songs weekly, and work hard to grow the orchestral library. Same goes for my weekly music show. But you have to know that “slow and steady wins the race” and that “short term profits create long term losses”.
Taking a step backwards is perhaps the most forward thinking thing you can do. We often think that pushing forward and ‘waiting until later’ is the quickest way to a goal. We want 6 minute abs, and speak Spanish in 1 week – but that doesn’t sustain, and isn’t a longterm model that builds a strong foundation.
I remember when Twitter had severe downtime issues in early 2008 because of their Ruby’s infrastructure. They were surpassing a community of over 5 million users – and had to move backwards in order to make their architecture stable. As a result, when the site wasn’t down, it was closed off for maintenance. After months of tweaking things got better, and today the service is fast, dependable, and boasts a community of over 75 million users. Even Twitpic shares a similar story.
Sometimes you have to take a loss before you can make a gain. And although it seems to pay off in the long run, just don’t be afraid to do it – it always pays off in the long haul. And remember to always think longterm – because sometimes the only way to take two steps forward, is to take one step back.
