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So now I'm going to have a bit of a digression but it won't make sense later.

But I wanted to talk a bit about leading vs. lagging indicators.

Now if you are in.

Well I don't know in certain industries like product management or something like that then you might

have heard about these already leading vs. let lagging indicators.

Sorry but if not I want to get into it a bit.

So what are they leading risk is lagging indicators are two types of indicators that deal with whatever

it might be you're dealing with a service or product or here it will be for networking actually.

Because usually what happens is success is measured later on in time.

So for networking it'll be the number of clients who get the deals you know the money you make.

That's generally how you measure success.

But if you're going to these networking events that's going to happen a lot later on right.

You might meet some people and then two weeks down the line whoever you meet said hey you said you are

a graphic designer right look I there's someone I'm dealing with who needs graphic design you think

you might be available you're like yeah sure you talk to that person go back and forth a bit you know

maybe it works out maybe it doesn't it gets delayed later on it does work out you start working for

them have a job that lasts three four months and then you get paid in the meantime almost a year has

passed and before you can actually measure if this was a successful event or not.

So that's why it's called a lagging indicator generally lagging indicator means output while a leading

indicator is input and that's why it's more interesting if you want to avoid this lag and having to

wait to measure the success of attending an event or what type of event to attend and what was successful

and what wasn't.

And if you want avoid the lag then what you do is you find leading indicators.

And so what our leading indicators like I said they are input so they're going to be a bit different

and sometimes a bit of an approximation but it's a lot more useful when you want to measure success

right away so if you want to measure something right away and you're talking about networking events

and and these types of events that you're going to attend then one of the ways you can do it.

One of the ways that I do is I'll tell myself ahead of time.

OK.

When I attend this event I'm going to get five business cards 10 business cards whatever it might be

as long as I get 10 different business cards then I consider it a successful event.

I'll worry later on about getting the clients what types of clients they are about retaining clients

and and how how worth it.

These business cards are.

But for now I just want X number of business cards because that's a good way to measure the event itself

and not worry too much about the lagging indicators.

Something else could be I will meet y number of people you know I'm going to meet whatever number of

people I want or if this sounds a bit ambiguous to you you could also say I will shake a certain number

of hands you know whatever works for you that you decide this will make a successful event and you can

tweak this as time goes on.

And that's in fact what I did and now I usually do it.

I measure it in terms of business cards because I can kind of hone in on the events that that I'm interested

in and I know that it would be kind of useful and I know by and large whatever business cards I can

get at these events will most likely be useful as long as I follow up with the correct way which I'll

get into later on.

So these little leading indicators can be quite useful.

And my recommendation is to find certain leading indicators that can help you achieve your goals.