He understood the universal constant in life that you get what you pay for. In entrepreneurship this is especially true. The harder you work, the more you are likely to accomplish. But it can be easy to trick yourself into thinking that aimless busy work is productive work. The fact is that if you don’t have an objective (aka, A GOAL) then you might easily keep yourself busy, but never really make any progress.

I have to confess that for most of my life I HATED Goals. For example, consider a sales goal. If I make a goal to sell X dollars worth of some product, that’s nice, but I really don’t have control over whether I meet my goal or not.

I have no control over whether I reach a goal

Before you head off to the comments section to tell me how wrong I am, hear me out. What I mean is that my ability to reach the goal is dependent on someone else making a decision to give me their money in exchange for my product or service. It’s his decision to buy, regardless of how persuasive I might be. I simply cannot make that decision for him.

So in reality, I don’t have any control over whether someone makes the decision to purchase from me or not. The same is true for getting optins on a website, visitors to a web page, donations for a cause, etc. Most goals worth setting depend on external factors, and those are always out of our hands.

I think that’s why goals always depressed me. I could make any goal in the world, but I felt so powerless to reach it. In my twenties I had an epiphany on the subject of goals that was really empowering. Even though I didn’t find a way to hypnotize my prospects to buy something from me or control those pesky external factors, I did discover a way to reassign my personal accountability away from the goal by splitting the goal setting process into two categories: Goals and Commitments.

How a Commitment is different than a Goal?

The epiphany came when I realized how goals differ from commitments. A commitment is something that I have absolute control over (at least relatively). For example, If I decide to do publish 20 comments on my facebook page, that’s not a goal, it’s a commitment. It’s completely within my power to accomplish it and doesn’t rely on anyone else making a decision. Sure there are external factors, but they aren’t related to human decision. They’re things like internet connectivity or my car starting. If I’ve really made a commitment I can find an internet connection at a starbucks and take the bus if my car breaks down.

The same decision independence is true for creating 20 backlinks, dialing 20 phone numbers, knocking 20 doors, etc. It’s key to understand that following through with these commitments doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ll speak with 20 people, since I can’t force someone to pickup the phone or answer the door.

The point is that a commitment is something I can say that I will do and the only person that can prevent me from doing it is myself. I think you’ll see in just a minute why this is so powerful…

More than a semantic argument. It’s empowering

I promise that I’m not trying to make some coy play on a semantic difference between two words (goal and commitment). Quite the opposite is true. I’m trying to provide a separation between two very distinct mental states. Splitting goal setting into two parts, one over which I have complete control and another over which I have very little control, empowers me to make a plan with specific action items that I know I can get done. Have a look at this diagram to see what I mean.

You might have noticed that I actually put a third component as a precursor to a Goal. The Object of Desire is a slippery devil. In many cases it can be hidden, forgotten and even deceptive. Think about it this way: What value is there in Green paper or small metal discs? None really. You see, it’s not the money we value. It’s the stuff that we can get with the money that we value.

We don’t really want $1,000, or even $1,000,000. What we want is the car, or the house or the freedom from debt or the once in a lifetime vacation… I think you get the idea. So when you set a goal to make X dollars in sales, it’s important to allow your mind to travel in two directions at once. You want to make sure that you know why you want to reach that goal (your object of desire) and what steps are most likely to help you reach it (the commitments you make).

Example: get 200 unique visits per day for keyword “xyz”

Let’s say you wanted to get 200 unique visitors per day from organic search results to a page on your website each day. There are some things over which you have complete control. These include getting a specific number of backlinks to your website every day, choosing a keyword that gives you a plausible chance of success, creating optimized content for the target page, etc.

There are also many things you can’t control, such as whether those backlinks stick, whether the search engines find and index those links, whether the search engines give you improved SERP results for those keywords. While you can increase your chances of getting clickthroughs by writing a good page title and including appropriate meta description details, you really don’t even have control over whether people click on your site even if you get the search engines to put it in the top spot.

So to reach the goal of getting 200 unique visitors a day to a web page, you make commitments to create backlinks and produce the best optimized content you can on the target page.

Now, going back upstream, it’s just as important to make sure you understand what your Object of Desire is. For example, you might be stroking your ego (think “coolest guy on the planet” wars) or you might be interested in saving someone’s life (think “donate children’s hospital”). The better you understand and the more you can shape your Object of Desire, the better prioritized your Goals will be and the more motivated you’ll be to follow through with your commitments!

Your game plan and the Feedback Loop

The strategy then is to identify a goal, followed immediately by creating a specific list of commitments that you have power to act on independently. The commitments you make should have a direct correlation to your goal. Now hold yourself accountable for completing your commitments, which you have power over, not whether you reach your goal, which you don’t have power over.

As time passes you end up with data that will either confirm or invalidate the usefulness of the tasks you’ve committed to do in terms of how they relate to your goal. If the data is positive, then you stay the course and continue on with your daily commitments. If the data is negative, you don’t have to change your goal, but you can instead change your commitments to see if another approach will work. There’s a chance that you’ll end up changing your goal, but it will be based on data, not whim.

This is called a feedback loop. As you change the input (your commitments), you observe the output (realization (or not) of your goal). Depending on the output, you may change the input. You might also adjust the desired output if a set of inputs is unable to help you achieve the desired output.

Throughout all of this, try your hardest to be honest with yourself about your real object of desire and let that understanding guide you to set the goals most consistent with what you want most. You might snicker when I say “be honest with yourself”, but the deeper you look to figure out what your real object of desire is, the more likely you are to be surprised by it.

Free Yourself!

Stop living as a hostage to Goals that you don’t have any power over. Instead get scientific and separate your goal setting process into two parts: Goals and Commitments. Then follow through with your commitments to reach your goals! Best of luck.

As he woke that morning his keen young eyes quickly took in the color of the sky and he thrust his hand through the small square hole in his wall to feel the air outside.  Rain would come soon and allow the ear of the wheat fill out.  He concluded that “it was as if Heaven had chosen this day to wish him well.  Earth would bear fruit.”

Throughout the book Pearl Buck masterfully portrays the value of the land, the soil and the ability it has to give life.  To accomplish this she contrasts the poor farmer Wang Lung to the mighty House of Hwang.  The juxtaposition of wealth and poverty, work and idleness, beauty and strength, is powerful and provides a very poignant perspective on what constitutes real value. The question never asked, but ever present: “Is there more value in the land or in silver?”

The final scenes in the book show a wealthy and old Wang Lung. Through hard work and discipline he had traded places with the House of Hwang. They forgot the value of the land and sold it to him in pieces, until he owned all that they once had. When he was finally too old to work the land, he returned to spend his final days away from the luxurious courts he had acquired. He moved back into the small three room stone house where his life began. He spent his days with bare feet in the soil. He loved to feel the earth.

In the puzzling way that values occasionally get lost before they can pass from one generation to the next, Wang Lung’s sons couldn’t see the real value of the land. Rather than growing up in the fields, working the land, they grew up in schools. They could calculate and barter better than their father, but they didn’t value the land.

In the final agonizing scene he quietly approaches his sons who came to visit him and he overhears them planning to “sell the land” to raise money to pursue other interests.  He chokes and stumbles and his sons catch him to hold him up.  In desperation with tears on his cheeks he tells them:

“It is the end of a family – when they begin to sell the land.  Out of the land we came and into it we must go – and if you will hold your land you can live – no one can rob you of land -

“If you sell the land, it is the end.”

His sons reassure their old dying father that they wont sell the land as they smile at each other over the top of his head.  They had lost track of the value of the land, just as the House of Hwang had done.

Where’s the value in internet marketing?

Wang Lung lived in the soil.  He also knew that he could die by the soil.  He understood the important relationship between the sky and the earth; the rain and the harvest.  He didn’t have the luxury of sitting idle or waiting on someone else to do his work for him.

As internet marketers do we understand the relationship between testing and profit; value and benefits? How many ‘would be’ internet marketers have been raised in schools, rather than in the field of knocking doors and producing content. They know the talk, but haven’t walked the walk.

Amid the din of discussion in the internet marketing space (which in the better circles focuses on time-tested direct response sales techniques), the best copywriters struggle and toil to teach the difference between features and benefits. It’s the tendency of newer marketers to place an emphasis on qualities and structure; features rather than benefits.

As marketers mature (they do this by reading the best books and working the field) their language naturally moves toward the concept of benefit. In the beginning it can sound a bit hollow.  The beginner’s efforts to identify benefits is quite often just a renaming of features or a correlation between features and benefits. This seems a good place to start, but it’s easy to spot, because there are many misses, and it still doesn’t talk to the heart of the consumer.

What are they missing? Could it be that they’ve never put themselves on the other side of the desk to consider life as their consumer? Just like Wang Lung’s sons that had no value for the land because their feet and hands had never worked the soil, many internet marketers have no respect for the consumer and the character of real benefits because they haven’t worked the tests and numbers necessary to find a winning combination that really strikes a chord.

Get your feet dirty

Ed Dale loves comparing internet marketing to farmville on facebook. The people that put in the hours move up in the world. They accumulate both experience, wisdom and, in the end, profit. The marketer that sets himself down to the grind of content creation and then judiciously distributes it in a way that permits proper testing will get the traffic. He’ll then be able to test offers until he finds one that’s a match for the niche or eliminates it as unsuccessful and moves on to the next.

Just as Wang Lung understood about the land, a bad crop doesn’t always mean a bad farmer and the necessity of success for the support of life doesn’t leave any time to sit around and complain. Whether the rain falls and the seeds grow into fruit bearing plants, or whether a drought prevents success one year or in one field, your work is the same.

Along the way you’ll come to appreciate the real value of content and the need to put in your best effort for it. Then the trick will be passing the internal substance of that value assessment on to the next generation of internet marketers so that they can produce for themselves.

I’m still working on the first part.

The second thing I did was determine to attend the University of Utah and study Electrical Engineering.  There were a few reasons that I chose electrical engineering, including the fact that it required a lot of math and physics, and it would help me understand what was actually happening inside the microprocessors for which I wrote my software.  These were all really interesting topics for me.  So I had been taking math courses at night at the community college preparing to transfer up to the U of U.

So when January 2002 came, I had been accepted to the U and was ready to start full-time courses.  In order to fully devote myself to my courses I quit my job (then with Studeo Interactive Direct in SLC).  I had put some money away in savings and I knew it was the right thing to do for my future, but it was a leap of faith since I wasn’t sure exactly how I would pay for my livelihood for the next five or so years.

Well, as fate would have it I got married in June of that same year, and kept going with school, but something unexpected happened.  My previous employer, and another agency in Phoenix where my brother worked, asked me to do some work as a vendor contractor.  A buddy asked me to build him an e-commerce website and then a few other people saw that and wanted me to do some work for them too.  After about a year I had a little business in full swing.

This little business continued on throughout my University education, acquiring clients and employees along the way, but I eventually closed it in May 2005.  The reason to close it was to be able to devote my full time effort to school again and to do research and work on my thesis.

Fast forward about a year and I start thinking about what to do after school.  At this point I have a lot of software experience and specifically web related experience.  I have also been self employed for more of my professional life than I’ve been employed.  As I saw it my options were:

• Get a job working in software/internet for someone else
• Start another business (past clients were asking me to do this)
• Get a job in electrical engineering

The decision was hard and so I selectively chose a few different options that I thought would be a good fit.  One in software, one in electrical engineering and I also met with a few old clients and considered what I might do if I started another business.  Out of the two companies that I applied to I received two offers.  I knew that I had a lot of ‘equity’ in software and could fall back on that, but that I would probably never have a better time than NOW to work as an electrical engineer.

My first “Electrical Engineering” job

Micron and Aptina badges (artistic rendering in inkscape)

So I decided to hire on with Micron in Boise ID.  The other offer I received was from Omniture in Orem UT.  That would have been a great position with a fantastic company, but I really wanted to work as an electrical engineer.  The position that they gave me was in the probe department working on imagers.  If you don’t know what an imager is, the easiest way to describe it is as digital film.  It’s a small piece of silicon that collects in the light, separates it into different colors and then produces the pixels of the digital image.

I’m not sure if I didn’t ask enough of the right questions during the interviews, or perhaps I just didn’t understand how the electrical engineering industry worked, but I quickly found that the position I had accepted didn’t require me to use any of the skills I had learned in school.  During my last year and a half at university I focused in on semiconductor device physics with an emphasis in optoelectronics.  Optoelectronics just means that it has to do with light, or in my case, how semiconductors absorb and emit light.  I was taking master’s level courses and working in the micro fabrication facility there on campus to design new semiconductor devices.

My new job, as it turned out, was very entry level, and I didn’t have a chance to use any of what I had studied in school.  But here I was in Boise.  I’d moved my family up here and I wanted to make the most of it.  So I decided to make use of the skills I had acquired as a business owner and software engineer.  I worked hard to improve my department as much as I could.  For example, during my first year I implemented a new work flow that included revision control using subversion.  Previously all of the engineers had stored their test jobs in directories on a shared network drive and there was no way to look at any file and know where it had come from or how it differed from previous releases.

One problem with revision control and finding differences between files was that they used a binary format to store their test jobs.  This meant I had to write a new piece of software that integrated with TortoiseSVN and WinMerge which allowed a “one click” diff of two binary versions of the software.  I also integrated the correlation and release data into the workflow process and created a program that would examine the binary test job and produce a detailed specification showing what all the parameters were for each test.

The next thing I noticed was that during test job debug my fellow engineers would use Winsows (I’m sure I should say something here like registered trademark (R)) notepad.exe.  This was very problematic since there was not way of seeing how all of the data in the text file related to other data in the file.  As a result I wrote a gui (graphical user interface, but if you’re still reading by now then you should know that) tool that used regular expressions to parse the log file and display data in a tabular way for comparison.  It integrated formatting, transfer to excel and even real time graphing and charting for progression analysis.

There were some other pieces of software that I developed that proved too radical a departure from the work flow to get traction, but they essentially amounted to abstracting test job parameters into a database to enable collaborative development and manage the release/rollback process as well as interdepartmental communication.  It would have also greatly improved the consistency between test jobs whereas their current state was somewhat varied depending on what base was used to create them and which engineers had worked on them.

So, as I look back, I didn’t actually get to do any real electrical engineering in my first (and only) electrical engineering position.  I guess I naturally gravitated toward software and improving business processes, which is what I had done in my own business during college.

Shift back to software

After a while I realized that I needed a shift and began to look around.  I got a few offers, including another offer from Omniture.  That was a hard decision, but was made a little easier to to the collapsing housing market which more or less locked us into Boise.  But in a lot of ways, we didn’t mind.  Me and my growing family love Boise.

Around this time, Micron had decided to spin off their imaging division as a separate company called Aptina Imaging.  They were mandating that everyone move to San Jose CA.  I wasn’t really interested in moving to CA either so I held out.  In time an option became available for me to remain in Boise and take a Software Engineer position under the Research and Development arm of Aptina.  This turned out to be a good move for me, all things considered.

In my new position I was able to head design and implementation of a new large scale processing system.  The amount of data that it processing is really staggering, reaching easily in petabytes every month.  I chose Python and a handful of open source and commercial databases to implement the system.  I focused heavily on unittests and followed best practices and design patterns everywhere that they made sense.  During deployment the system proved very resilient to changes and replaced an old system that would have required a $500,000.00 license.  It also improved performance and reliability over the old system.

So after about a year and change with Aptina, I started to long for a couple of things.  One was interaction with more people on a daily basis that the handful of engineers at work.  They were a fun and lively bunch, but I wanted to interact with lots of people.  I also wanted to be more in control of what projects I pursued and how I pursued them.  In short, I wanted to be in business for myself again.

This biggest deviation from my previous business during college is that this time I want to focus on direct to consumer sales, rather than having clients that then sell direct to consumer.  I’ve been studying this on my nights and weekends for about a year and a half now and I really enjoy it.  It also adds another dimension to my skills that I could use if I ever did take on new clients in the future.

Whew!  So almost three years after taking my first electrical engineering job I’m finally ready to admit that I like software and maybe I even like direct sales more.  So, here’s to my future as an internet direct sales guru (forward looking statement).