Suppose I walk up to you in the street and I say to you, “Hey, that last important thing you did? That was awesome. Magnificent. Superb! You’re totally kick-ass.”
What’s your reply?
“Thanks! It was a lot of work and I’m proud of the result. Glad you liked it!”
or is it more
“Oh, well, thanks. I mean, it was… I got pretty lucky. Some bits were kinda good.”
If your answer was in category two, I have a task for you:
Drop every other project so you can work on never, ever saying that again.
Why?
Because that belief is what’s stopping you from being awesome online. Or anywhere else.
Two things recently have reminded me about this. One is a totally fantastic mind-shifting article from synecdochic which you should go and read and follow all the links of but here’s one paragraph I had to quote because you need to read this:
Every time you do something that’s hard for you, every time you transcend some personal boundary or cross some goalpost you thought uncrossable or work really fucking hard at something (even — especially — if you fail) or do something you thought you couldn’t do, it is an accomplishment, and it’s important to acknowledge it. Every time you receive a compliment and say “thank you” instead of “oh, it’s nothing”, you are striking a blow against a poisonous, toxic, and dangerous social model. And every time you do that publicly, you give strength to someone else who sees you do it, because by accurately valuing your accomplishments and achievements as accomplishments and achievements, you teach others that their similar accompishments and achievements are things to be valued — and thus, by extension, that they are to be valued.
YES.
That’s a great definition of how to be awesome online:
Transcend boundaries, cross impossible goals, work really fucking hard. Succeed or fail. Value the accomplishment.
And then start again on a higher level.
So it’s really like this: crazy effort –> success or failure –> high five –> crazy effort –> success or failure –> high five
Ad infinitum. You start out with small (but still terrifying) challenges:
- choosing a domain name
- writing the first content
- telling one person about your website
and you grow toward completing ever-bigger and more insane challenges: First sale. First launch. Full-time operation.
Except that’s not happening.
If you don’t value your accomplishment… the circuit breaks. If you aren’t aware in every molecule of your body that sending that important email was totally goddamn awesome, what’s powering you to take the next step?
If you don’t value your current achievements, why on earth would you bother making more?
Are you going to say “the cash” or “the feedback” or something? That’s dangerous ground, dearest. Working solely in order to achieve an external reward that you have zero control over is problematic, for three reasons:
1. You don’t generally start receiving external rewards for at least a couple months of starting a website.
2. The supply could dry up at any time, and then where will you be?
3. It makes you use short-term grasping strategies, over and over, in order to keep the reward coming. If it’s not paying you tomorrow, it’s out the door.
You can’t control external rewards. You can control your mind.
The fight for the delete key
Remember how I said there were two things that have brought this to my attention recently? The other happened while I was writing the sales page for Awesome Fear-Wrangling (This sales page is 3,000 words long and profusely illustrated. I love it.)
I’m going to offer two versions of the resource, one with consulting, and of course this means I have to convince people reading the sales page that my consulting is worth paying for. So I wrote this line:
I’m excellent at helping you cut through the core of your stuckitude to see what the real issue is.
And twenty minutes later as I was proofreading I saw that line and my first thought was, “Maybe I should tone that down. I could say that I’m “pretty good” at it.”
You know that noise when a record gets stopped suddenly that gets used in movies to indicate “Say WHAT?” Do that noise.
That voice needs to die. The voice that suggests that I shouldn’t tell people I am excellent at anything. Even when I am! I am excellent at helping people with that. I am excellent at building connections with my commenters. I’m excellent at writing posts that help people. I am… breathing fast and feeling my pulse beat in my chest. Damnit.
To hell with you, downplaying voice, and to hell with the control you seem to have over my parasympathetic nervous system.
I AM AWESOME. I have accomplished astounding feats through hard work, talent and support. I have built strong relationships with dozens of magnificent people in a very very short time. I have surpassed every expectation I had about myself. I have written excellent articles. I have built a thriving and caring website that makes me proud. I am fucking Kick. Ass.
I am awesome, online. Every day.
Not just a touchy-feely exercise
Other than my own well-being (which is monumentally important, of course) there are two gigantic benefits from being able to accurately value my accomplishments:
It makes my sales page much, much cooler. And more effective! People don’t want a “pretty good” solution to their problems. They want a GREAT solution. And if I can say, with excitement and honesty, that I have such a thing? I’m new to sales, but I’m confident that will help.
Also, I can acknowledge the glorious achievements of other people. I’m excellent at that, too. It makes both of us feel good, adds to the overall awesomeness level of the world, and is the single most effective relationship-building technique I have ever seen, if you’re sincere. (Which I am.)
Oh, that reminds me.
Don’t you DARE…
… come into the comments and try to downplay me. I know there are people who feel the need to trim the tall poppy or add “a much-needed dose of reality to the proceedings”.
Stow it.
I’m sorry for you. You probably caught a large dose of the toxic conditioning synecdochic was talking about. You’re threatened by other people’s self-confidence and accomplishment. If you ever want help getting past that, I offer my assistance.
But don’t bring it here. Or I will tell you to FUCK OFF.
Your five-minute mission, and you should stop reading if you can’t accept it…
Loud and proud in the comments, people. No “buts”, no “lucky”, no equivocations.
Tell me how magnificent you are. With exclamation marks.