Fantasy vs. Reality

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If there’s one lesson that I’ve learned it’s this: business is a head game.

It’s not the work that gets you. In our line, there’s no such thing as hard work. The hours may be exhausting. The pace may be maddening. But the work is easy.

Take my granddad, by turns a sharecropper and mule skinner. Try to tell him that this business of programming, of writing, of marketing is hard. No. The work is easy.

But we do face a problem that he never did. For him a week’s labor produced a week’s results. A month spent clearing land left a month’s worth of land cleared.

But us? We can work day after day, until we’re exhausted, we can put everything we have into a project, and still have nothing to show for it.

Why is that so? Why are business and programming so nonlinear? Why are some people able to push straight to their goal, while others spin in circles, never gaining any ground?

I think it boils down to this – successful entrepreneurs & programmers are able to distinguish fantasy from reality with a better degree of accuracy than their less-successful colleagues.

If you’re a software entrepreneur, chances are you’re a smart, creative, driven person. You have to be! You have to be able to imagine a future that is better than today. Otherwise, why would you bother?

But this can also be your downfall.

Because as you’re imagining a better future, you start to slip. You start to let your desires color what you believe to be possible.

And so you wind up making a YouTube clone, certain that everyone will switch because you have feature X.

You spend 6 months in development, with no though towards marketing. Then you wonder why your product’s not selling.

You waste time struggling with imaginary problems, thinking it’s impossible to start because you don’t have an office, a staff, or a cool-enough web site. (Your only real problem is that you don’t have a customer)

Have you fallen into any of these traps? Of course not. But I know I have.

One of the hardest things in the world is to distinguish fantasy from reality. But it’s a skill that’s not optional.