I remember way back when I first started trying to create a business for myself that I’d eagerly seek out stories of others who had done the same, looking for trends so that I could replicate their success. There are of course hundreds of these and it didn’t take me long to find a couple examples that mirrored my own experiences. The common thread that I found amongst them all was that overnight success never happens overnight and that more often than not you’ve got a few solid years of working on something before it starts to get traction. That was a revelation in itself for me since I had always ascribed much of the success of these kinds of people to luck or something I had no control over.
Of course over the past 2 years I’ve seen nearly every inspirational story there is to see and read thousands of articles on how to build a successful business. Sure many of them have been helpful but recently I’ve found myself deliberately avoiding any success stories or how I did it articles, finding them to be rather tedious and uninformative. Indeed the vast majority of them are usually a bunch of high level waffle of how they do this or that, with those things usually being one of the industry hype terms of the time. There are of course notable exceptions who attempt to give you real actionable advice but even they fall prey to make things so general as to be useless to anyone.
It feels like I’m suffering from some major inspiration fatigue. Back in the early days these stories of success pushed me to keep on coding on those days when I felt I was being less than useless, knowing that if I kept at it that eventually I’d have something of value to release upon the world. After failing to attract attention both from Y-Combinator and the general public with my Lobaco beta these stories of success started to seem more like the exception than the rule. I fast became disillusioned with all these inspiring tales of how success followed their hard work, instead wanting the real meat of what they did in order to achieve success.
Maybe its more that I’m at a point where I know that there’s the possibility of success out there and hearing about it no longer helps to inspire me to achieve it. Perhaps its the realization that there’s thousands upon thousands of much more talented developers out there working on their own ideas that are much better than my own. In any case I can no longer take comfort in the just the mere idea that success awaits those who put in the effort and will only be content upon its realization.
Or maybe its just a slow news day and I had nothing better to write about, you can be the judge on that one.
