What’s Your Hit Rate?

I was reading an interview with Gary Barlow (best known for being the main singer and songwriter in boy band Take That and now appearing on the UK ‘X-Factor’ TV show) and in it he made a very interesting observation.

Gary said that he writes one hit song in every twenty-five. That is just a four per cent success rate.

‘Wow’ I thought. That changed a lot of stuff for me: certainly it spoke to me about perseverance and also knowing yourself and your market.

It told me that Gary must write a heck of a lot of songs bearing in mind how many successful songs he has written for the band, and for some other people during their hiatus.

It also made me wonder if Gary is setting himself a limiting belief, and maybe he could change that and write a hit song in every ten or even five songs? That could be an interesting challenge!

What I was most taken by is the fact that Gary still believes he can write more hits and he just keeps on keeping on; writing and writing until something comes up that sells like crazy and goes to the top of the charts.

It’s the same for your business: Ali Brown once said that when a product for her business doesn’t sell as much as she anticipated, she knows that is because there is something better that is going to come along, and this is just one of the steps to getting there.

It is very important to remember these two stories from highly successful people when you are working on your business. You may not get it perfect this time but you have endless opportunities in the future and it is this perseverance that will bring you success. As David Neagle says ‘People don’t fail – they choose to quit!’

This entry was posted on 08/11/2011 at 11:33 am and is filed under Mindset, Business, Celebrity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.