"Numbers are valuable storytellers.
They will tell you whatever story
that suits your desire and agenda; however,
the importance of those numbers and stories
may be subject to wide debate."
-- Albert K. Strong
This is the 2,190th Daily Inspiration since I began publishing them to the public. It also completes 6 full years because they began on September 29th, 2009. What does that mean? I don't know exactly except that it is quite a few, and probably accounts for about 6,000 or more hours of time spent doing them.
Let's see. . . that would be 250 24-hour days. I earned 0 dollars doing this, but I wasn't doing it for money anyway. However, the benefits to me were enormous and far reaching. I've grown. I am more as a result of expressing my thoughts. I've become a better writer, and I've expanded my thinking.
Have others benefited too? Yes. How many? I haven't got a clue. I know that it has been opened all around the world and that it has grown in traffic, but it is out there in numerous formats from this email newsletter style, to the blog, to facebook, Tumblr, and more. It's out there for those who want to stumble across it.
What numbers matter? I don't know.
Facebook. I have 801 friends. I know some of them, but not so many. It's nice to have friends. How many friends does it take to be popular on facebook? I'm not sure that it has that much to do with numbers.
Twitter. I have done 4,365 tweets, have 1,148 followers on my personal account. Are any following me because of my tweets? Probably not. I think they are just looking for people to follow them. I follow 1,958 of them, and since I don't pay any attention at all to their tweets, why should they pay any attention to mine?
Then there's LinkedIn, and I'm a member of several other social media accounts like Pinterest, InstaGram, and many more.
Here's an interesting number: I have a Google Plus account. On my Google Plus account, I have 47 followers. Frankly, I don't know how I got that many because I have pretty much done nothing to expand this social media account. However, and here's the interesting part: My Google Plus profile has 8,612,667 views as of the moment I am writing this. Wow! What made my profile so popular? I think I've done only 8 posts, and not all of them on purpose, so it can't be anything I've said. No. It has nothing to do with me being popular or witty. It's photos. Because we do so much blogging for a lot of clients and we use photographs, there are now a few thousand photos in my Google Plus account. So, it's the photos that make me popular. Wow! Over 8.5 million views. . . What does it mean? Not much, but I guess I could make up a great story.
The most popular blog we have done to date is the Commercial Truck Success Blog. It has 3,006 posts since April of 2008, and has 782,732 page views at this moment. Wow. Over 3/4 of a million page views about commercial trucks. The next closest blog in page views has 143,899 and it's also about commercial trucks. Go figure. But, they both have more views than this because that metric wasn't measured until 2010. What do these numbers mean? I don't know. A lot of people from all over the world are looking at one of them anyway. What are they seeing? One of those 3,006 posts I expect. I try to offer value and encourage interest, but who knows?
I've got another 42 days to enjoy being 65 years old. How did I ever get this old? Sometimes I think it just snuck up on me unaware, but that's not really true. I don't feel old. I'm much younger in my head. I do know that there isn't so much value in looking backward because much of it is a blur. Not that it went by quickly, which it seems like now, but I'm not certain that my memory is all that trustworthy. If it weren't for some photographs, I might have just made it up.
It has been said that everything that can be measured is not necessarily worth measuring. Of course that would be a personal decision. But, I know that there are a variety of stories that can be told about pretty much any numbers. Yours might be much more interesting than this dribble, so I'll leave you to your number stories.
I Hope You Enjoy The Stories Of Your Numbers. Might As Well Have Some Fun With Them!
Spread Some Joy Today--by treating yourself today. You deserve it, so what the heck!
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