The Numbers Aren’t the Point

Joshes and Joshettes, lately I have found myself thinking about numbers and how much power we sometimes allow them to have over us. We track almost everything now. If you publish a book, you can see sales, page reads, rankings and reviews. If you have a podcast, you can see downloads. If you run a website, you have traffic numbers. Social media gives you followers, likes, views and engagement, and even something as simple as going for a walk can end with your watch giving you a collection of numbers explaining how well you did. None of those numbers are necessarily bad, and some of them can be extremely useful, but I think there is a point where information slowly turns into a scoreboard and we start allowing today's number to decide how we feel about everything we've been working toward.

I recently experienced that again with this podcast. When I recorded the latest episode of The Books By Josh Audio Immersion, the previous episode had been available for about six days and had seven downloads. From June through August, the podcast had around seventy-three downloads even though I barely released anything during that time. Those aren't massive numbers. I'm not going to pretend seven downloads is secretly some incredible achievement or act like Spotify is going to show up tomorrow with a giant check because seventy-three people downloaded episodes over three months. At the same time, though, seven downloads still means seven people chose to press play on something I created. I don't know if every person listened to the entire episode, whether somebody stopped after two minutes or if somebody accidentally clicked it and immediately decided they had made a terrible mistake, but there were still people on the other side of that number.

That is where I think numbers can become misleading without actually being wrong. A dashboard can tell me seven people downloaded an episode, but it can't really tell me what happened afterward. Maybe one person heard something that made them think differently about their own situation. Maybe somebody was going through the same thing I was talking about and hearing another person say it out loud made them feel a little less alone. Maybe nobody got anything out of it and seven people simply listened for a few minutes before moving on with their day. I honestly don't know, but the number itself doesn't give me enough information to decide whether sitting down and recording that episode was worth doing. If I only looked at seven and compared it to another podcast getting thousands of downloads, I could convince myself very quickly that there was no point in recording another one.

The same thing has been happening with my writing. For a while, my books were averaging somewhere around ten to thirteen dollars a day in revenue. If you stretch that across a month, you're talking about roughly three hundred to almost four hundred dollars. That isn't life-changing money, and it certainly isn't enough for me to announce my retirement and disappear somewhere with a beach and unlimited drinks, but after writing for almost two decades and spending plenty of those years making almost nothing from it, that number means something to me. Then I had several days where the revenue dropped hard, including one day where I made less than two dollars. When you've finally started seeing something move in the direction you want and then suddenly it goes the other way, it's difficult not to start questioning everything.

My first instinct is the same one a lot of people probably have when a number suddenly turns against them: fix it. Maybe I should start running ads. Maybe I need to release something different. Maybe I should look at whatever genres are selling the most right now and write more of those. Maybe I should stop experimenting with ideas I think are interesting and focus only on whatever has already proven it can make money. The same thing could happen with the podcast. I could research what other podcasts are talking about, figure out which topics generate the most attention and slowly turn the show into something designed around getting the largest possible number instead of me sitting down and talking about whatever has been on my mind lately. Some of those decisions might actually improve the numbers, but there is also a point where I would have to ask whether I'm still creating because I enjoy it or whether I'm just feeding another dashboard.

I think that becomes especially important now because we're surrounded by people telling us how easy it supposedly is to make money doing almost anything. Open YouTube and somebody will explain how they built a faceless channel using AI. Another person will tell you how to publish digital products, start a business, write books, build an app or create some completely automated system that earns money while you sleep. Some people absolutely do make money doing those things, and I'm not saying every person talking about it is lying. What I think gets lost is how many people try the exact same thing and never make anything meaningful from it. You usually don't see the thousands of attempts that went nowhere because those people aren't making videos titled, "I Tried This for Six Months and Nobody Cared." We end up comparing our real numbers, including every bad day and failed attempt, against somebody else's finished success story.

Working in sales and retention for years probably helped teach me this lesson before I ever started thinking about it through writing. There were days where everything went right and days where almost nothing worked. You could have a great stretch where you were saving customer after customer and then suddenly have a day where you barely saved anybody. That didn't necessarily mean you forgot how to do your job overnight. Sometimes you just had a bad day. The customers were different, the situations were different and there were variables outside your control. You still came back the next day and started again. I think creative work and business are very similar in that way. The difficult part is that when you're working for yourself, there isn't always a manager or coworker there to remind you that one bad day is just one bad day, so it becomes very easy to look at a temporary drop and turn it into a story about your entire future.

None of this means I think we should ignore numbers. That would be just as foolish. If nobody is buying something for months, that's information. If readers consistently stop after the first book in a series, that's information. If a podcast topic performs significantly better than everything else, that's information too. Numbers can tell us where we should look and sometimes they can show us a problem we wouldn't have noticed otherwise. I just don't think they should automatically be allowed to decide what something is worth. There is a difference between using a number to make a better decision and allowing that number to decide whether you should continue at all.

I think that is the part I have to remind myself of whenever I catch myself checking Amazon again or looking to see if another person downloaded an episode. The numbers will move. Some months will be better than others. Some books will do well and some probably won't. There will be episodes that more people listen to and others that almost disappear the moment I upload them. The same thing is true for almost anything worth doing for a long period of time. Progress isn't a straight line, and today's number isn't a promise about tomorrow. Sometimes the hardest thing is simply learning to look at the number, understand what it's telling you, and then keep moving without allowing it to tell you who you are.

Thanks,

Josh