The emotional journey of creating anything great
Publicly creating anything is an interesting experience. I&#x27;ve spent my life coding, but in my spare time I&#x27;ve created things: magazine articles, apps, presentations, books, and so forth.<p>When you first start, you&#x27;re usually in love with yourself. Anybody watch &quot;A Christmas Story&quot;? Most new creators are like little Ralph, amazed at how awesome their work is.<p>At some point, you move into being a professional. Then you realize that everything you create sucks. It just sucks in various ways and to various degrees. The difference between an artist and an amateur is that the artist is never satisfied with their work.<p>That&#x27;s the internal battle. Externally, over and over again, you release some new &quot;incredible&quot; piece of work, tell everybody about it?<p>Crickets.<p>Nobody cares. You, if you&#x27;re an average person, could find a cure to cancer today. Nobody would care. There&#x27;s a whole universe set up in each genre around who&#x27;s important, who to listen to, and so forth. The quality of your work and the value of your work have nothing to do with anything. All those years that Google told us that if you wanted to be heard, just publish good content. It was bullshit. Humans don&#x27;t work that way. We are a social species and we consume based on social cues.<p>I finished a book last month, Info-Ops. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leanpub.com&#x2F;info-ops" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leanpub.com&#x2F;info-ops</a> Took me six years to get through it. At the end, am I happy?<p>Not so much. Angry is probably a better word for it. Creating something does not immediately cause good feedback to happen. Just the opposite. Now the _real_ work begins: getting people to listen. And that&#x27;s usually a long, difficult, demoralizing slog. You suck it up and move on. The only people I know who are extremely pleased with creating a major work or either the already-successful -- or the people who don&#x27;t know any better.<p>I&#x27;ve heard successful startup founders describe it as going out there with your message and saying it over and over again until you&#x27;re completely sick of it. Then saying it some more. When we see these successful companies, what we don&#x27;t realize, as the tweet shows, they all spent time talking to the wall.<p>My big mistake over the years was not romanticizing the creation part. I moved to professional status fairly quickly. It was romanticizing the curve of despair part, oddly enough. I had to learn that there&#x27;s no honor or special hero status for moving through this stage. Lots of failed efforts go through it as well. (In fact, the stats say it&#x27;s more likely that you&#x27;re on a failed effort. You still have to go through here.) You have to mature and see it as just more work, like the rest of it. The reason I use the word &quot;anger&quot; to describe the feeling is that it&#x27;s much like taking a shovel and digging a small hole -- then realizing that the job in front of you is to dig an entire trench. There&#x27;s usually some cursing involved.<p>You can say that&#x27;s it&#x27;s all fun and challenging, or you can say it&#x27;s all pain and misery. But it&#x27;s just the work. At the end of the day, it&#x27;s just the work.<p>Some people say successful startups are all luck. Some say they&#x27;re all hard work. The truth is that they&#x27;re all on this same journey, whether it all ends up well or not. If you stick with it, you might succeed. If you give up, you never will. (Insert Zen&#x2F;Existentialism discussion here)