People overestimate what they can achieve in a year but regularly underestimate what they can do in a decade. Today is the tenth anniversary since I sold Intelligent Games and I look back on the last decade with some pleasure.
I enjoy being a writer enormously. I work with bright people at great companies, including HP, Microsoft and others. Business is good and keeps growing and evolving. I learned to fly and got my commercial pilot licence. I married Aileen. And now I am developing a new online application and rediscovering my innermost geek.
Barrie Bergman writes that he never met an overnight success. I agree. But it’s very exciting to think what can happen in a longer period. My feeling is that it is important to feel free enough to follow your bliss but directed enough to persist with things long enough to allow them to come to fruition. Getting this balance right is perhaps the key life skill for the 21st century.
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Sometimes I wonder if people go into these things thinking that way and get shot down when they find out it doesn’t work that way. I have to admit I kind of hoped for that, but I realized I’m going to have to work to succeed. And that’s what I’m doing. It’s like some kind of test or something.
It’s amazing what a little bit of determination and time can do for you.
I think success = determination x time is a reasonably good model. But happiness is something other than success so there are different forces at work and the trick is to keep them in balance. Matthew
Congratulations on a decade of writing career success. As someone who is coming up on a decade of freelancing myself, I can appreciate somewhat the work that you must have put into it.
A colleague who taught a resume-writing class liked to tell people, “whenever you’re feeling down about your career, go look at your resume.” It’s the same principle — every now and then we need to take stock of how far we’ve come. A decade is a nice peak from which to view the trail . . .
Congratulations.
Time and determination are indeed key. It’s easy to get disappointed too early and miss out on real opportunities which take time to come to fruitition.
BTW I think getting a pilot license and marrying Aileen are no less important than a successful company.