The Secret To Secrets

Josh Pollock - June 03, 2015

I love experiencing a great conference speaker in person, but opposed to most people I don’t feel the need to try and somehow absorb the wisdom of every slide with the camera on my phone. During these talks I want to yell the same thing, I want to yell in an art museum, “you can’t capture this experience with a camera! The pictures are better on the internet anyway!”

I don’t, because I’m not a total asshole. Instead, I take two deep cleansing breaths and get back to enjoying the experience of the art or kick-ass presenter.

Last weekend, I had the privilege of seeing Chris Lema present at WordCamp Miami on blogging. This talk was so good, that at one point, without even realizing it, I had my phone in my hand to take a picture of a slide.

You see, in the middle of this talk, he announced that he was going to share his secret for writing consistent and consistently awesome content. He built it up as a big reveal. When he finally switched the slide to his big reveal, which was clever, but not earth shattering, I couldn’t resist grabbing my phone — despite knowing that the picture wouldn’t allow me to absorb Chris’ awesome blogging powers.

I didn’t actually take the picture, because my phone’s camera sucks, and I knew I could download the slides later.  But I should have, as it would have helped set up this story.

People Taking Photographs With Touch Smart Phone During A Music

What he showed off was actually really smart, but his “secret” is not earth shattering or incredibly unique. If you watch the video of the talk, don’t just skip to his big secret secret. Make sure to not only look at his process, but listen to when he talks about the amount of work, discipline and dedication he puts into blogging. Then study what he’s been doing every day for years.

I’m doing pretty good with my blogging and my business right now. But neither are anywhere close to where I want them to be. I want to scale both by at least an order magnitude. IE I want posts on this site to go from hundreds of views to thousands of views, and go from a hundred or so downloads a month on CalderaWP.com to two thousand downloads a month.

For awhile now, I’ve been on a quest for the secret of how to accomplish these goals. I know it’s not like finding a new, shinier sword or magic amulet in a video game.

sword in the stone

I’ve been talking to a lot of people to get their opinions. I’ve organized a mastermind group. I’ve change what I talk about in my articles for Torque so I can explore these projects, and conduct interviews and research on relevant topics.

WordCamp Miami was very well-timed for this quest. The day after Chris’ talk on blogging, he spoke again after Cory Miller, of iThemes and before Syed Balkhi of WPBeginner, OptinMonster, List25 and a whole handful of other successful products. That’s as solid of a three hours you can get for a business owner.

As I heard these three awesome entrepreneurs share their secrets, one after another, I actually got way too many good ideas. More good ideas than I could ever put into practice in my business. So many great ideas, that I will have to choose which ones I try to implement.

That’s the secret to secrets, they are only valuable if you choose the right ones, and put the work in to make them work for you. These people I look up to are successful because they followed through on the “secrets” which were never really secrets that they learned.

Will I get to the place they are one day? I hope, but it’s not going to be because I kept looking for secrets, and found the ultimate secret to instant success. That’s how video games work, but I’m not very good at video games, which I don’t have much time for these days anyway. Not with the amount of time I’m putting into creating my own success, slowly, one day at a time.