What is The Best _ _ _ _? is one of the most common questions one sees on the internet. It gets asked over & over for the same product & situation which in itself, tells us something pretty important.
I promised you 10 Tips. I could do the fashionable thing right now and simply write an article about something completely different seeing I have dragged you in here but that would be bad manners. There are enough people preying on others for that already.
Happy Hunting Ground
- There is no Best, no perfect solution that solves all ills. There are however a lot of options. While there are people who can give valid advice, crowdsourcing what you should do is an exercise in futility, especially if, like most people who ask this Q, you haven’t put all the information about your situation in the pot. If your situation is not fully known, all you learn are the narrow habits & opinions of others as lost & stuck as you.
- Know your self, know your situation; is the absolute key. Sure you can buy the thing that people you judge most like you have said is the right thing, but are those people actually you? Do they know what you are really trying to achieve? Do you know what you are really trying to achieve? Especially if your answer to the last is vague – or relies on becoming “just like” [insert famous name here] then you have a problem that The Best of anything is unable to solve.
- Simply buying The Best or most popular in your demographic won’t make you anything but a bit poorer and a bit more like every other person trying to do the very same thing, the very same way as you. If those other people are your competition, is it wise to be just like them? You may have a unique spark but it won’t come out if you are focused on being just like…
- Know your investment. so that sounds like totes wrong dude hehe What that means is that if you want The Best, what are you going to put in the pot to start the stew? An empty pot never becomes full of stew. There are many ways to invest. Some are coin, but the most important investments are time & passion. What resources do you have in your grasp right now? If you say nothing then you absolutely aren’t trying. Time can be found, money can be found. If you have passion that is. What are you prepared to do right now? If the answer really is nothing then accept that and drop the idea of being that thing. That is ok. Find a dream you are eager to work.
- Generally in a busy market, there are a lot of options ranging from really cheap (incl. free) to scarily expensive. Some people think because it is expensive, it is The Best. Some people think that anything that costs money is a scam so only use free tools. Your call I guess. There are some amazting free tools. There are some amazing, really expensive ones. There are a host of really amazing tools in the middle of the market too. All this proves is that price really has nothing much to do with it at all. Just be aware though that if it is free, what is the real cost? Sometimes that is signing yourself up to an email that always tells you that to be good enough, you need more – not a good trade. Some are free simply because no one would pay for such a poorly designed tool that started life as one thing then bloated it’s feature set to try to get (or hold) takers. Look for overall workflow more than specific features (or numbers of features). If you buy a tool solely because it does this one trick everyone is using, is that a good investment in standing out?
- Investing in something pays dividends. I know that sounds obvious, you can’t make money off the share market unless you invest in it. Yet the very act of asking “What is The Best” is a way to appear to be doing something whilst not doing anything at all. Investors don’t pretend, they wade in – boots n all. The very act of investing is a commitment. Once people have paid for something, they are more likely to learn it, work it, get results with it. Not all people though, many just buy the thing as a token to say to the world, “Look Ma I is a [insert cool occupation here]”. Learn the tools you use, not vaguely but intimately. You marry your tools. Not reading the manual is like never listening to your partner. Epic Fail!
- You aren’t anything until you have a product. Call yourself a musician, writer, blogger, shark hunter all you like. It counts for absolutely nothing until you have fat fishes flopping at your feet – or an album, book, blog posts (the first three don’t count for squat). Be outcome focused, not tool or process focused. 300 songs that you never finished don’t help anybody at all. One song (with a dubious singer called Bob Dylan) can seem to change the world. Once the first project is out, turn to the next. Never be just writing, just making tunes, just blogging… Have an outcome. For me it always is an album. I am working on my next album. By the time you have three [insert your thing here]s with your name on them, you have a habit. People can see that this is a thing you do.
- It isn’t the tool, it is what you do with it. The Best of anything is useless if you don’t use it. The only use for tools is to make things. I could go buy the same guitar Jimi Hendrix used but it won’t change my musical abilities if I hang it on the wall as a trophy. Hendrix’s personal guitar also won’t help me. Hendrix could play. He put in a lot of time. Simply owning his guitar wont make any of that skill (or talent) rub off on me. I need to learn, to find my way to use my tools. Matter of fact that is part of what Hendrix did. He used what he had, his way, instead of copying. That is a killer lesson right there.
- Work what you got. Any tool can deliver a result. Sure some tools make that a tiny bit easier – right tool for the job and all that. Sure you can’t do such a great job hammering in screws with a circular saw, but the really smart people learn to use the tools they do have in interesting ways. Who made the rule you need screws anyway? Let your limits become your strengths. If you think you need a tool, maybe you could do a better job with it but are you using the tools you already have well? Are you making yourself worthy of the tools you already have?
- Start from where you are. This is #10 when it is really #1. Start from where you are. The reality is that you don’t rightly know how to get from where you are right now to where your dreams have you going. There is no simplistic formula where you buy tool x and become star y. Journeys have similarities sure, but mostly they’re made in Hollywood. The take-home is that successful people take stock of what they have and start making something. MacGyver your career instead of waiting on the shopping channel to come along with the right thing at a low, low, cost (coz’ we all know why they fold to fit under the bed). Make the book, record, blog on hunting sharks, that you can right now. Publish it. Take stock of where you are and do it again. The tool, The Best or otherwise, didn’t do that. You did. You can do it better because where you are at now has grown somehow. Or it should have if you are doing it right.