🎯 Nobody's born with great aim · Six-Figure Freelancers

Nick Bandy

Sep 2 • General discussion

🎯 Nobody's born with great aim

You're not bad at this.

You just haven't fired enough rounds to find out either way.

TARGETS won the recent poll and it wasn't close. So let's go back to Path 3 for a second.

You’ve got three dials to adjust.

🎯 TARGETS, who you aim at.

💣 PAYLOAD, what you drop on them.

⏰ TIMING, when you show up in front of them.

If you get TARGETS right, everything downstream gets easier and cheaper. Get it wrong and you can write the best pitch of your life and get nothing back.

Do you know what zeroing is?

When you first pick up a new rifle, the sights—the thing that helps you aim and hit your target—are almost certainly wrong.

So you take it to the range and you fire a group. Not one shot. Five, ten shots at the same target, same way, no fiddling.

Then you walk up and look at where they actually landed.

They're never in the middle. They're two inches left and low. So you adjust the sights, fire another group, and check again.

That's zeroing. And here's the first piece that matters for you:

You cannot zero something you have never fired.

The misses aren't failure. The misses ARE the data. There is no other way to get it.

Now. Three people walk onto the range.

The first fires ten rounds, sees they're scattered, decides the rifle is junk and goes home. He blames the range, his gun, the wind...he learned nothing and he's now certain of something false.

The second one never fires at all, because he's still waiting for a target good enough to be worth the ammunition. He's been standing there for three months. His sights are exactly as wrong as they were in the shop.

The third one won't fire because he's decided he's a bad shot. He's decided it in advance, without evidence, about a rifle that has never been zeroed. Which was never going to shoot straight for anybody.

Same outcome for all three.

🟥 No data, no adjustment, no hits.

That's TARGETS.

Not "aim better." Fire enough rounds to find out where you're actually pointing.

Fire a group → read where it landed → adjust once → fire another group.

In our language:

Send a batch of proposals → read what came back → change ONE thing → send another batch.

Most people change something after every single proposal. That's not adjusting. That's guessing with extra steps, and it guarantees you never learn which change did anything.

There are ONLY two ways to do this.

One way is to STANDARDIZE your process and treat your proposals with the same care you treat your actual WORK.

Today I'm giving you that piece of the puzzle, the zeroing part. How to diagnose whether your aim is off, and WHY it's off, before you've burned another three months getting nowhere.

Back when I was getting nowhere in 2014, I finally sat down and asked myself three questions instead of just feeling bad.

🎯 How many did I actually send? Not "a lot." The number.

🎯 How many came back at all—any opens, a reply, even a no?

🎯 Of the ones that came back, how many had real money behind them?

I found out that:

🎯 I was NOT sending a LOT of proposals. 5 per week if I felt like it, or 25 when I panicked about money.

🎯 I was NOT getting very many opened. One per week, tops, with an occasional reply.

🎯 I was NOT bidding on jobs that were appropriate for my experience level. I seesawed between "only bid on big contracts" when I had no work history, and "only bid on sweatshop jobs so I can get SOMETHING going."

Now, what do you think changed when it finally started working for me?

Can you guess?

It wasn't that I suddenly made the proposal “better,” per se.

I'd been rewriting my proposal every single time. Every one was a fresh experiment with a sample size of one. I had three months of activity and zero information.

Not just “personalizing” it.

But totally changing the structure and style of the proposal every single time.

After I started standardizing my outreach process, I eventually landed on a “good enough” proposal that got my foot in the door with bigger clients, eventually winding up with a long-term stretch as one of the founding members of a digital marketing agency.

The important part:

🎯 You cannot know if your proposal is bad if you don't fire.

🎯 You cannot know if the targets were bad if you don't fire.

🎯 You cannot know if you are a bad shot if you've never fired.

🎯 One shot isn't data. A group is data.

🎯 Change one thing at a time or you learn nothing.

Then:

1️⃣ Pick a batch size you can actually sustain for a week.

2️⃣ Send them all the same way. Resist the urge to tinker mid-batch.

3️⃣ Read the group, change ONE thing, go again.

Now, of course, there's a second step to this.

Once your rifle is zeroed and you're actually hitting what you aim at, you run straight into a new problem:

The good targets are the ones everybody else is shooting at too. That client is holding 50 proposals and yours reads like all 50.

Zeroing gets you on target. It doesn't get you the contract.

That's 💣 PAYLOAD.

Want that one next, or do you need time to go fire a few rounds first?

Lemme know 👇

If nobody's ready, I'll hold off.

The wind beneath your wings,

Nick

P.S. The other way I mentioned to get your TARGETING on track is to get feedback from the client side of hiring, which "shortcuts" the number of shots you have to take AND the time you spend "zeroing."

That's Upwork Backwards, and anyone who ponied up the gigantic $20 a month for Premium can find that in the classroom starting this Friday.

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🎯 Nobody's born with great aim