“Being the best in the world is highly underrated.”
-Seth Godin, The Dip

When I read The Dip the first time.  I was restless. Something was off kilter.  I misread the message.  The message I got was Try Harder Than Anyone In The World Right Now. In Godin’s words: Power through the dip.

By itself, that’s a recipe for burnout. The real message is: Raise your standards till you make or do something better than anyone else does it. 

I had this little business, see.. I sold websites to Realtors, Accountants. etc.  The damned Rotary Club. On a good day, I was mediocre at it. (Some of the story is here, more is here). It’s still open, limping along.  I’m not suggesting anyone buy anything, I’m taking care of the wind-down.

I sold a lot of WordPress websites. Hundreds. I used Thesis and Headway for this. I was fast at it. I was shoving mediocrity down the throats of the world, faster, faster.

How Burnout Happens: First, Tolerate Mediocrity….

I tried to help. But it was a job. The chase of volume meant it was a job. I wanted to be a half notch better than the  dumb templates that they all bought that were $99/month for next-to-nothing. Econ class thinking.  I needed to make an income, it was a lifestyle business. Of sorts. I was bereft of imagination at the time. So it didn’t provide an amazing lifestyle.

I was running from it. I hired Trish.  I hired designers so I didn’t have to design (I can’t summon the muse). I hated the business from the first. It was there because it made sense. Every email filled my heart with despair. “Oh, shit what does she want.” I burnt out because – in my heart -. I knew that the work didn’t matter.

Get some Relator to the first page of google for his “Suburb +Short Sale”. God. Who wants that job?

I didn’t prepare. I blew off calls.  I blew off conference calls. I never got much better than what I was when I started.

I hoped that nobody would show up on Webinars I was doing so I could have a beer. Any – flimsy – excuse was a welcome reprieve.

I invented a McJob for myself. I never meant to.  Each step seemed reasonable.

More People Aren’t Going To Save You

I brought in people – Rachael Acklin, Chris Jordan.  Tennyson Rog. Kasey Kelly.  Others. I asked them to be part of the “fun.” when I pitched it to them, it seemed reasonable. “Just do a header, footer and the rest, and get it done fast so you can make a few hundred bucks a week, while you’re between projects.”

Problem is, it’s not just a couple hours in design work.  It’s also letting your soul get infected with a notion that mediocrity is sometimes OK. That we’re just doing our jobs. That’s cancer of the worst kind.

Because I was just trying to make dollar-store websites. Nobody could care about a site that a designer put a couple hours in.  Not me, not the designer, not the client.  And yet, the tension that the creative act requires, the energy, you still had to summon it. The act of making something itself is tense. It requires both effort and thought.

Cognitive Dissonance: Nobody Wants To Be Mediocre

I made errors at PageTent/FlatRate/Whatever I called it. I underestimated the creative energy required to do work. Mediocrity demoralizes you before you start. It’s hard to invoke the muse on some never-gonna-matter website. “Oh, great muse, please give me the strength to tell yet another story of yet another realtor that wants to help you buy or sell a home.” That prayer doesn’t happen.

Who wants to go through all that? I’ll leave that to Meyers. They can –  and do – sell pabulum.

Thee act of doing work that you know – at the outset – is going to wind up being mediocre is taxing. That created cognitive dinremarkable and mediocre creates stress and tension. Why should I be doing this? Is this who I am? Some monkey making websites for idiotic Realtors? (an aside: I was an idiotic realtor).  It’s painful at the outset, it’s painful in the middle, and it’s painful at the end.

But hey, I netted a few hundred bucks each time. It was fun. Really.

.:.

People Run Through Walls To Be The Best in The World

Jason Moore, my friend and partner at Simplifilm says that quality sells. I’ve always believed that selling sells. The first big project we did together, lives on at AgentTechSecrets.Com.

…it’s beyond obvious that that video is something to see. It’s a bad story, masterfully told.

Quality Sells. That’s what Jason said to me.  

OKAYfine.  The problem  with that idea is that when you’re broke, you can’t paint in color.

You have to take what seems to be now money because you’re always a step ahead of the spider. You have to do “now” things. I was broke, and my big client was forever paying me late. I had to do “now things.” I was stuck in the badlands.  People that tolerate low quality work are often low quality.  This meant drama and hostility from clients.

This created a circular effect. A drama cycle that mired me on the respirator for 2 years.

By not doing quality work, I didn’t get quality people. By not getting quality people, I couldn’t do work at the creative pace I wanted to.  By not doing great work, I couldn’t say no to money, even when it was attatched to a crazyperson.

(By and large, my clients were fine, I had to put up with, probably, 30% morons. That’s down to 0% with Simplifilm).

Enter Simplifilm: Quality Sells

It started by accident. I did a little work for some folks in the WordPress space. It was about that time I was learning to use Headway Themes.  They were coming out with a new release, and I also knew that they needed a video to show that they weren’t the same as the other things out there.

I pinged Jason -can we do this? Can we make Headway 2.0 an amazing product. Can we do it cheaply? 

Yup, he said.  We got it together, haggled with the owners of Headway (great, great folks), and made it happen. He and I worked out arrangements so we’d do it for a price of almost nothing.

We made this video:

THAT was a software video. THAT was quality. EVERYONE was blown away, and the relaunch of the video on the site contributed to a 200% increase in sales.

The day the video dropped, everyone wanted one.

Jason did 90% of the ‘awesome’ over on Headway. I just stayed out of his way and showed him what Headway did.  Helped when he needed it, and kept Grant (always impatient) muzzled (Grant is Awesome).

The day after we got Simplifilm done we got 3 more: MarketMeSuite, Borders (RIP) Bookbrwer and WishList Member.  Ramit says it’s a business when you do it 3 times.  We had three customers and then it was clear that we’d be fine. We are, we are.

My Flat-Rate Mistake: Trying To Build an Industrial Age Factory In The New Economy

The new economy isn’t about production or distribution.  The businesses that think it is are dying first. Look at Borders. Look at the record industry. Going, going, gone.
I was trying to do that – create a factory where I’d be part of a cascaded of indifferent propagation. I’d put out mediocre websites populated by mediocre content. There wasn’t one person in the chain that had any skin in the game. There wasn’t a soul that was a stakeholder there.

Not me.

Not the customer.

Not their readers.

I created a business that was the modern day equivalent of whatever you see in the end-caps at Walgreens. We did an honest enough job, but it was really tough to give a rip about it. Just like the T-shirts, or consumer electronics that sits there. People bought. Nobody cared.

The lesson of the Dip isn’t “to become the hardest working grinder in the world,” it’s “to become the best.”  We are getting close to becoming the best on Earth at telling software stories. We’re not there just yet, but the distance we have between us and the rest of it all is exhilarating. The air up here tastes better than any air I’ve ever had. I can’t wait to get higher.

I was asked a few times – why are you making this blog?  OKAYfine.  I’ll answer.

I’m not going to be Seth Godin or Malcolm  Gladwell.  That ship has sailed.  I don’t have stars in my eyes.

I’m not even going to be Chris Brogan or  Scott Stratten or any of those guys.  I don’t have the temperament to pursue those goals seriously.  So why blog publicly? Why do something if you’re never going to be the best in the world?

A few reasons:

First, I want practice.  I want to learn how to build and keep an audience.  I want to learn what works, what doesn’t work.  I want to do it in a relatively safe, and self contained space.  Worst case scenario – here – I screw it up, I just end it. Nobody depends on Instigate.Me for livelihood.

I want to be in the habit of writing for the benefit of others.  Some narcissistic personal branding blog won’t do that. I don’t know how John Chow does it (and well).  I can’t pull that off, so why try?  What I can do is talk honestly about the stuff I’ve learned.

A personal mission statement is bullshit.  I’ve done ‘em and they made little almost no difference.  This is sort of a testament of where my thoughts are at a particular point in time.  I have little doubt that if this goes long enough, I’ll disagree with a lot of what’s written.  I have little doubt that

When I’m running regularly and writing, the rest of my life falls into place.  Things just go better. I’m centered. Not given to chatter, delusion or nonsense.  I need to write and to run to live. I think humans were made to move.

I need to get better.  As we create stuff our capacity to create generally improves.  This is that project so I make sure I don’t go idle.

I’m no expert. I’m a reader of lots of things, particularly philosophy. That may change.  My favorite passages, thus far, are from Ayn Rand, Marcus Aurelius and Miyamoto Musashi.  There will be others. (Ayn Rand, it’s important to note, has some of my least favorite passages, as she was given over to shrill nonsense for much of her life).

I want to know what I think, when I thought it and how future thoughts got informed.

I want a snapshot.  I suspect that I will change my mind about a lot of the things I write about.  I suspect that I will someday cringe at what I initially wrote.

Anyway, this is “why.”  Many reasons.  None of them matter that much.