A Thousand Thousand Little Decisions

There’s a invisible graph line that’s familiar to everyone who’s launched a new venture - a thousand thousand little up-and-down steps to get to the big peaks - like putting a new web site online. It’s sometimes a little jarring to come back to the copy (or source code, or Illustrator files) - the shock of the familiar. “Oh yeah…guess I did do that.”

I don’t know of a shortcut for those thousands of little steps. Maybe there is one - that might the motive behind people paying online ‘gurus’ for the secret sauce / special process that will turn them into online rock stars. My bet is that the gurus have lived that invisible graph line, and done those thousand thousand little things themselves, over and over. THEN they stepped back and looked at the bigger pattern.

A blog is one of those little steps. Like most blogs, this one will probably end up with cobwebs and old entries. Blogging is a bitch. I don’t find it hard to write - that’s easy and natural - but I find it hard to decide whether what’s in my head to write is relevant, or useful, or interesting. (That decision is another of those thousand thousand steps.)

Anyway - to get this site (and blog) live & available to the world, I’ve got to go execute a bunch of arcane-looking technical steps. DNS entries, SSL certificates, blah blah blah. A thousand of those puppies - get one wrong and none of this will be published.

Honestly…one of the reasons I don’t worry about robots and AI putting everyone out of a job is that the thousand thousand steps involved in damn near everything from making dinner to launching a company aren’t nearly as well defined as we think they are. The improvisation, discipline, connect-the-dots ability and (frankly) gumption it takes to get something done aren’t going to fit in neat algorithms any time soon.

Hard stuff. Fun, but hard.

–Matthew