Will Blogging Generate Business?

This is my first blog. I’m sure you will be able to tell this if you continue reading.

I am a consultantaccountantbusiness man – old school kind of guy. I get the idea of using emails and postcards and phone calls to generate business. But this new age stuff – blogs, Facebook and Twitter – I’m not too sure about.

However, my new boss, Jim, says this is the way of the future. Something about in-bound vs. out-bound marketing mumbo jumbo. Plus, Jim has hired this twenty-something Blog Queen that we have to “communicate” with for bringing in new business (only kidding, she is a great gal – or can I still say gal?).

So I am going to get with the program and try to come up with ideas or thoughts or bring up things that I think would be of interest to business people and see what happens. Over time I will become good at it. I am sure of this because I believe in hard work and commitment to a task.
Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers, maintains that anyone who expects to become world-class at anything had better plan on doing it.
And what is “it?”

“It” is practicing thousands and thousands of hours. Gladwell says 10,000 hours.

In the case of the Beatles, they played night after night in Hamburg, Germany’s strip clubs. Here’s how John Lennon remembered the experience, “we got better and got more confidence. We couldn’t help it with all the experience playing all night long… In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours, so we really had to find a new way of playing.” When the Beatles returned to Liverpool, they had become a seasoned, musically disciplined band with their own sound.

In the case of Bill Gates, he started doing his 10,000 hours when he was in the eighth grade. His high school purchased a teletype machine that was linked to a mainframe computer in Seattle. Gates and his buddy Paul Allen used that system to the limit, then found a way to get computer time at a software company where they spent literally thousands of hours learning how to use the new technology. Here’s Bill Gates on that topic. “it was my obsession. I skipped athletics. I went up there at night. We were programming on weekends. It would be a rare week that we wouldn’t get twenty or thirty hours in.”

Abraham Lincoln? Historian Gerald J. Prokopowicz writes, “over the 25 years that he practiced law, Lincoln (and his partners) handled an average of more than 200 cases a year, an awesome workload.”

Do the math. Two hundred cases for 25 years come to 5000 cases. (Actually there were more than 5000 cases.) Let’s say Lincoln spent just two hours on each case. (On some he certainly spent less time, on others far more.) That easily comes to the magic number 10,000 hours that Gladwell has written about.

Lincoln, like everybody who has ever made a lasting mark in any field, got to be good at what he/she was doing by putting in thousands of hours of practice.
So I have got about another 9,999 hours of blogging in order to become world-class. By the way, by my calculations, I have about 80,000 hours of business experience. Just another one of the BrainSell experts trying to help our clients.