Keeping Score of Your Success

Mike: Hey, it’s Mike Hambright from FlipNerd.com and we have a quick expert tip to share with you from Doug Ottersberg, who’s going to share a tip on why keeping score is important to your success.

Doug: Hey everybody. So, absolutely, when you are working towards a goal in your life, regardless of what that goal is, how will you know when you’ve achieved it? Along the way, you’ve got to keep track of what you did in order to get to your goal. “So, what do you mean by that, Doug?”
Let me give you a really good example. A lot of people are always dieting. A lot of people want to lose weight. When they say they want to lose weight, more particularly, I believe what they’re saying is, “I want to lose fat.”
Now, I’m one of those people. I noticed a picture of myself at a Christmastime, I’m like, “My gosh, you put that basketball underneath my shirt. Where’d that stomach come from?” I started out figuring out what I needed to know to make that go away and I realized very quickly that I needed to keep track of my different areas along the way.
So, what did I need to keep track of? Well, I needed to keep track of how much I ate. I also needed to keep track of how much I weighed. Well, I started keeping track of how much I weighed and the weight was going down, but at the same time my head was feeling light and I was getting skinny and losing weight but in the wrong places. So, what I also found out is in addition to weight, I needed to keep track of how much fat am I actually losing.
What a lot of times happen is, people will start out on a program, on their plan to reach a goal, and something will take them off the path. They’re not getting the results that they want and they’ll feel like they failed and they’ll say they failed and they’ll stop. Well, I want you to write this down. There is no failure, there’s only feedback. There’s no failure, there’s only feedback.
So, what happened to me on my personal journey here is, for example, I got the feedback that there’s something you need to do that you’re not doing. For me, that was not only do you need to count the calories, Doug, you also need to make sure that you’re eating the right amount of carbohydrates, the right amount of protein, the right types of carbohydrates. Oh, and you also need to have the right fats in your diet because if you don’t, you’re going to start losing lean body mass, which is what was happening, and the fat’s going to stay there.
You also need to have different things that you’re measuring. Now, it’s like “Oh, okay”. So back up, I haven’t failed, I just learned some new things. Let’s adjust our plan and let’s keep moving forward. The only way I could’ve done that is by keeping score and learning what I needed to keep score with.

Mike: That’s great.

Doug: So, two quick examples, if you’re doing marketing, you need to track where your leads are coming from and you need to keep track of how many of those leads actually convert so you’ll know where to put your money. That’s the type of thing that I’m talking about. Keeping score gives you the feedback you need to make adjustments as you move forward.

Mike: That’s great and look at it frequently, too.

Doug: Absolutely, look at it frequently. So, for example, one of the things we talked about quickly is knowing where you’re going. You’ve got to have a vision, you’ve got to write it down. All too often, and I’ve been guilty of this myself, we write things down, put them in a drawer and never look at them again. You got to look at where you said you wanted to go, look at and keep track of what you said you were going to do to get that feedback to know how you’re doing — am I on course, am I off course — so that soon as you find you’re off course, you can get back on course and change up what you’re doing so that you can continue moving forward.

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