The emotional journey of creating anything great

My strategy for dealing with the dip/valley of despair are a few simple rules that I have formalised for myself and are helping me a lot.

- Howsoever great the project is in the beginning, it will go through a phase where it’s going to suck for whatever reason. I know it. It doesn’t surprise me. I take it in my stride.

- I have absolute faith during that phase that it will get better on the other side. Absolute. And nothing is going to convince me otherwise.

- It is not a sprint.

- Mantain healthy relationships, mind (meditation) and body (exercise). Do not let them fall below a certain level because gaining these things back and being productive at the sometime is a struggle. From my own personal experience.

Publicly creating anything is an interesting experience. I've spent my life coding, but in my spare time I've created things: magazine articles, apps, presentations, books, and so forth.

When you first start, you're usually in love with yourself. Anybody watch "A Christmas Story"? Most new creators are like little Ralph, amazed at how awesome their work is.

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.

That's the internal battle. Externally, over and over again, you release some new "incredible" piece of work, tell everybody about it?

Crickets.

Nobody cares. You, if you're an average person, could find a cure to cancer today. Nobody would care. There's a whole universe set up in each genre around who'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't work that way. We are a social species and we consume based on social cues.

I finished a book last month, Info-Ops. https://leanpub.com/info-ops Took me six years to get through it. At the end, am I happy?

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'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't know any better.

I've heard successful startup founders describe it as going out there with your message and saying it over and over again until you're completely sick of it. Then saying it some more. When we see these successful companies, what we don't realize, as the tweet shows, they all spent time talking to the wall.

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'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's more likely that you'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 "anger" to describe the feeling is that it'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's usually some cursing involved.

You can say that's it's all fun and challenging, or you can say it's all pain and misery. But it's just the work. At the end of the day, it's just the work.

Some people say successful startups are all luck. Some say they're all hard work. The truth is that they'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/Existentialism discussion here)

I found that there is no valley of despair if I'm working on something that has absolutely no chance of turning a profit. Open source or pure research or hackery with a non-commercial horizon never stresses me out. If on the other hand I hope that this will make me money, despaaaaaair.

Yet, the non-financially viable journeys don't necessarily mean 'not great'.

It's called traversing a valley of the fitness landscape. The comfortable strategy is to just stay where you are, with everyone else mediocre, at the current local population maxima. The uncomfortable strategy is to dare execute on your visions; which often means passing through states of lower energy before reaching the great. You think you see a hill higher than the one you and everyone else is standing on right now, but you're not sure because it's far away. What posts like these rarely mention, however, is just how many ants die far out in the low-energy desert plains; we only hear about the successes.

Seth Godin wrote a book on this a decade ago, called The Dip. It's short, but a good book (and the Audible audiobook is quite good too).

https://smile.amazon.com/Dip-Little-Book-Teaches-Stick/dp/15...

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/the_dip/

Of course the first half of this graph is the same as the journey to creating something that fails :). Persistence is required either way. But it's important to consider cutting your losses at some point too.

One hard part is putting aside the stuff you wanted to get in there, but then you remembered you only have one lifetime.

Worse yet, you keep finding more and more great details, which you wouldn't even have noticed when you started, but now have the experience to appreciate. Then spend more time wondering whether anyone else would care about them.

Either "Great artists SHIP!" eventually overrides, or else ... the quicksand wins.

(Read earlier today that Tolsoy originally published 'War and Peace' serially, then heavily rewrote -that whole thing-. Ay yay.)

I always tell people that for any worthwhile project there will be phase of deep regret "why did I ever start this?". It's a little sad that a lot of management and project planning methodologies don't allow for this and want to convert work into simple linear steps.