Sadly, ‘benjamin’ died of dysentery before he could win his blog prize.
How tragic!!
Strangely, this post almost exactly describes my adventures in Oregon Trail.
You win the blog!
[CynicalTyler on January 9, 2009 09:49 PM ]
What you’re forgetting is that it takes an enormous amount of effort to believe that you can successfully market a $^%#ING ROCK! Not only that, but you have to introduce yourself to women in bars by saying oh, well, you see, I sell individual painted rocks. The utter carnage this effort wreaks upon your very soul far outweighs even the most meteoric rise to success. So even if, on your and my time scale, the pet rock’s success appeared to occur over night, for the poor mortals whose life’s work it was to hawk their infernal creation, each second dragged on as a lifetime.
@CynicalTyler:
oh, well, you see, I sell individual painted rocks.
Thank you for this new pickup line, I will try it tonight!
When I do contract work for people and they’re writing a commercial app, I always tell them if they’re still around in 10 years, they have a chance. This business is all about longevity and continual improvements, as you noted.
I started PictureShare.net, which is just a wallpaper changer, in 1996, and I’m still working on it. And it’s just a wallpaper changer! Admittedly, it’s a kick-ass wallpaper changer, but still, that’s all it does and I still work on it a lot.
Very true. If you get a huge wheel rolling, it will roll and nothing stops it like a snap. But the wheel gains speed really slowly…
Incrementalism baby.
Each day you put another stone on the pile. Then one day you’ve got Everest in your backyard.
Some very deep philosophy here.
Well that was pretty inspiring…
dusts guitar
I found this examples http://www.jonathanfields.com/blog/the-dirty-little-secret-to-overnight-success/ eye opening.
Before that, he’d been practicing for hours every day for nearly 15-years. In fact, he even appeared on The Tonight Show when he was 3 to show his prowess hitting golfballs, before slipping back into relative smalltime public awareness.
Now, now, Jeff, you’re telling half the story.
You aren’t mentioning the other rockstar involved in this show.
Or the others who did a lot of the work as dedicatedly as you do. Yeah you run the show, but what about the rest:
http://stackoverflow.com/about
You know, when two’s company.
I’ve been looking far and wide for one good soul who isn’t a snake and well, have not succeeded yet. Pair programming and peer review is the awesomest approach in my situation, but nobody seems to want to work with another programmer. At least with me, that’s been the experience. I don’t deal with terrorists or druglords and that’s obvious from whoever I contact. But they’re mostly happy to keep the money for themselves, whereas pairing up would actually make it better for both.
Remember always, two is company.
So if you want to run a company successfully:
(a) two is company, not one.
(b) keep good company for the good of your company.
Someone needs to point me to a link on how teams form on the internets and how they succeed on fail. Knowing Jeff’s documentation skills (hint: blog archives) it’s there somewhere, no only if i could find it…
Well upto the point that I get a guy (good, bad or ugly) to make a team of two, all i can do is post some things here and there … like just every other solo gig.
Anyone interested in not keeping it all for himself ?
(PS: Not a shop on Broadway, please)
It’s another reminder of knowing which Dips are worth leaning into and which ones are worth avoiding.
Nothing’s worth the paying the price to find your ladder was up against the wrong wall. Well, actually, I guess it’s worse to quite a Dip that would have been worth it if you just would have worked through the resistance.
Resistance is your friend. It makes you stronger, and it separates the wheat from the chaff. It helps keep success from being over-crowded at the top.
Thanks.
Reading your post helps put things into perspective. So that now, when I’m stuck writing test documents (because I’m the only one on the team who has official training), I can think back to this post and know that in a few more years, this will all be much easier.
The important point to to take away from the post however, is that you need to keep pushing yourself, learning new things, understanding things you already know better and in more detail, and not to just keep doing over the same things you do everyday. Even if you need to use your own time, such as evenings and weekends, that is what will make it all worthwhile.
Thanks,
Schmuli.
I think StackOverFlow will fail, I hated it after a moment and found it boring. May be you need to change its strategy
@justanotherkeyboardguy: The other rockstar (Joel Spolsky) as much as I like him… seems to contribute virtually nothing to Stackoverflow, except maybe the whoring out of FogBuzz which I am eminently, profoundly tired of listening to.
Just sayin’
Hi Jeff, yup, great blog posting. I started MrTweet.net (which i was extremely gratified to note that you have used). many people congratulate us for the great growth we had, but far too few people realize that it has been the 4th implementation of the discovery engine we are building. and we are under no illusion that we will need another 1-2 years before being providing sustainable value add at all. Yes, value takes time!
Just found this old article that is related to it taking years: a href=http://www.gusmueller.com/blog/archives/2005/12/25.htmlhttp://www.gusmueller.com/blog/archives/2005/12/25.html/a
I’ll have to agree with words said in Paul Buchheit about GMail being a POS. They did introduce the unlimited space Inbox, which we are all thankful for, but as far as the interface go I wouldn’t touch it even if it was the last webmail service around.
This blog is very inspirational. Thanks Jeff.
I started blogging a few months ago, and I’m giving it all I’ve got. And I will take your advice and be patient. Thank you Jeff.
I read Paul Buchheit. I also read you often. However I missed this one. Got this link from someone else reader list. Very inspirational writeup. Thanks.