Operating The Machine
There is a car sitting in my driveway, the head gasket is blown. It hasn’t moved from it’s spot in two months now. Mechanically, there has been a breakdown. No matter how strong I am, the car can’t be moved by my strength alone. I can huff and puff, straining and exerting myself with three other fellows and it would scarcely make a difference. We could move it across the driveway, but that’s about it. It must be in good working order and running in order to go anywhere. Right now, the machine is useless. I need the car in good order to be able to drive.
This is especially true when it comes to the internet and technology. One example is running a PPC campaign with AdWords. I can paste a thousand links by hand, but it won’t be as effective as running one campaign. It takes humility to sit back and let the machine do the work. Despite this realization, we often want to do things manually, as if we get extra credit for doing things the hard way. But learning how to drive the car, keep it out of the ditch, and chugging along is the greatest skill of them all. The irony is that this actually takes the least amount of effort.
We need to be a good operator.
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What are the skills involved? We need to understand the system and its mechanics. Then we can know its capabilities and limitations. We need to know where the controls are at so we can operate it. We watch our gauges and instruments to tell us about the health of the system. We listen to feedback and make precise adjustments to get where we want. We also need to perform the proper maintenance to keep it running . Change the oil every 3,000 miles, replace the tires when the tread depth gets below 4mm, replace the wiper blades so you can see when it rains.
If you’re like me, you can’t possibly know everything about your vehicle. There’s so many systems and intricate parts working together under the hood. I listen to how it’s running so I can tell when something is off. I watch things, taking time to observe the machine in action. I take it to a mechanic I trust when I have an issue and I can’t repair it. He has the tools and expertise to fix it when somethings wrong. I don’t try to tackle things that I don’t have the tools for.
But I know my vehicle better than anyone else. I see it every day. A good operator needs to check it periodically and stay on top of the maintenance. I don’t go looking for problems because I want to find them, I look for problems so I can fix them before they become a big deal.
Then I can have a machine that runs smoothly for a long time.
