noinput.net

For about the past week, I’ve been in this nasty funk I just can’t kick.  It wasn’t till this weekend where I spent some time really thinking about everything I’m invested in and what it all adds up to when it hit me.  I’m not playing the web game as a game, I forgot about strategy.

Early this year I started my own business again and I can’t complain, things are going great.  But I realized tonight that the reason I can’t get excited about new projects and get back into things is because I havn’t had a win for a while.  Not just an “awesome, we launched the site” but a real win. I’ve got so many projects in between phases and on their way to that point that it’s just getting me frustrated and I forgot about why I’m doing it all in the first place.

I had a good talk with my friend/partner Jason tonight who helped me think through it and told me about a new post on Seth’s Blog that pretty much put me in line:

The secret of the web (hint: it’s a virtue)

Patience.

Google was a very good search engine for two years before you started using it.

The iPod was a dud.

I wrote Unleashing the Ideavirus 8 years ago. A few authors tried similar ideas but it didn’t work right away. So they gave up. Boingboing is one of the most popular blogs in the world because they never gave up.

The irony of the web is that the tactics work really quickly. You friend someone on Facebook and two minutes later, they friend you back. Bang.

But the strategy still takes forever. The strategy is the hard part, not the tactics.

I discovered a lucky secret the hard way about thirty years ago: you can outlast the other guys if you try. If you stick at stuff that bores them, it accrues. Drip, drip, drip you win.

It still takes ten years to become a success, web or no web. The frustrating part is that you see your tactics fail right away. The good news is that over time, you get the satisfaction of watching those tactics succeed right away.

The trap: Show up at a new social network, invest two hours, be really aggressive with people, make some noise and then leave in disgust.

The trap: Use all your money to build a fancy website and leave no money or patience for the hundred revisions you’ll need to do.

The trap: read the tech blogs and fall in love with the bleeding-edge hip sites and lose focus on the long-term players that deliver real value.

The trap: sprint all day and run out of energy before the marathon even starts.

The media wants overnight successes (so they have someone to tear down). Ignore them. Ignore the early adopter critics that never have enough to play with. Ignore your investors that want proven tactics and predictable instant results. Listen instead to your real customers, to your vision and make something for the long haul. Because that’s how long it’s going to take, guys.

With a combination of patience, dedication, and playing the game, things will change up for me soon and I really just needed a good weekend of thinking time to get me over that hump.  I plan on spending the rest of this week getting re-amped about what I have that I can continue to work on and how I can better manage my time to still enjoy what doesn’t need to pay the bills.. like my beautiful wife-to-be, my awesome family, my puppy who keeps me sane, my love for photography, and my hidden passion for video.

Up until a few hours ago, I really wasn’t sure what was going on in my mind.  Now I see that I was so caught up in getting to the next month that I forgot about next year.  I’m going to calm down on trying to keep up with cutting edge and practice more on the standards that will test the laws of time. If I loose a project because of that, well, the fact is it probably won’t pay off in the end anyhow so I probably saved myself a few months of pain.  AJAX is exciting, crazy design is sexy, and OpenSocial, Facebook & Myspace are still annoying, however focusing on everything I already know and pushing the limit just a bit more each time doing it with style will never fail me.  It’s time for a win, or at least a checkmate in this game.

UPDATE: Found another great post on mashable this morning.  The last line brings it all home.