Hard work

Seth Godin has a really great Labor Day post about what hard work really means today:

Richard Branson doesn't work more hours than you do. Neither does Steve Ballmer or Carly Fiorina. Robyn Waters, the woman who revolutionized what Target sells -- and helped the company trounce Kmart -- probably worked fewer hours than you do in an average week.

None of the people who are racking up amazing success stories and creating cool stuff are doing it just by working more hours than you are. And I hate to say it, but they're not smarter than you either. They're succeeding by doing hard work.

There's a new book out there that I thumbed through at the bookstore recently (and I'll put in the name when I remember it). I enjoyed a particular passage that argued that the biggest different between those in the middle class and those in upper class is that most of us in the middle class are risk-averse. We don't want to take big risks because, even though there could be pots of gold at the end, it's really hard to get to there. Most of us will give up before we get to the reward, which means most of us will fail, which means why bother in the first place.

I'm as guilty of this as anyone. I keep hoping for the "right" idea to come along, and I keep pushing off big ideas that aren't quite "right enough." I'm slowly waking up to the fact that it can't be "right enough" without a lot of effort.

Starting this blog was a risk that I easily could have not taken. I'm still not working hard enough on it to make it a product people really want to read regularly, but I've done the hard part, which was committing publicly to do something. If I'm going to own a domain name, I better keep putting new stuff up there. And (I think) it gets better over time, so even if it stinks now, I'm in a position to continually improve. Remember, even today's favorite swans started out ugly.

If you have a big idea you're hedging on, start with committing publicly. Get the idea out of your head and tell someone who can hold you accountable, "I'm going to do this." When you've told people that you're in the game, your incentive strongly biases success.