I’ve blogged here about notions of “success,” mostly as part of my own reflection of my blogging projects and in reflection of cyberculture in general, but I think it’s time to dig a little bit deeper into to the topic. This might turn into a minor series. You’ve been warned, and I hope these thoughts are helpful to you and your own processes.
The kind of success that I’m talking about, is one that’s made up of some unequal mix of: an active audience, some sort of functionally remunerative business model, that centers around the production of something useful. The something is often a popular blog or other independent digital publishing, a podcast, some sort of cottage industry, software development, or specialized consulting.
I’d like to begin by offering a somewhat counter-intuitive conjecture about the nature of cybercultural success. Success on-line is nearly always the result of many years of hard work that–in the moment–doesn’t appear to have any direct payoff. Furthermore, by the time people do become successful they’ve typically learned a lot about what they do, and gotten past most of the “difficult” aspects of what they do which means additional success begets more success at the expense of little relative effort.
In other words, you toil for a long time and it feels like you’re treading water. Then you make a breakthrough, but by now you’ve gotten good at what you do, you’re not struggling. You continue to kick ass and you find yourself able to make more breakthroughs, with much less effort than your first breakthrough.
Success online, is often about developing a community around what you do and communities are the kind of things that grow very slowly until you reach “critical mass” at which point they seem to grow pretty quickly.
You might, call this series of breakthroughs both the creative ones and the community building ones, “taking your game to the next level” but I think that would be a poor analogy, and in point of fact a somewhat poor explanation of what’s going on.
Being successful at what you do–and I really do think that this applies to everyone from writers, to working artists (eg, the Betsy crowd), to independent software developers, and beyond–is fundamentally an iterative process. Although it looks like, from the outside, that people make these breakthroughs in their work, they do this not by working on the “next-big-thing-which-is-going-to-change-their-work-for-the-better,” but rather, by working on doing something awesome every day. by making little changes to their processes that improve things, by being reflective and experimenting. This is how “products” (creative or otherwise) get better. The answer to “how do I take my work to the next level,” is always, keep doing whatever you do and keep trying to be awesome, every single day.
Community, by contrast, does seem to “have levels,” but the ways that successful communities form, aren’t typically the kinds of things that you engineer success. As I see it, the ways to develop communities grow out of–in addition to being awesome at what you do–grow out of being “the first” person to make something that answers a collective need, to use a large real-life network to catapult an online community. Let’s take examples of people who do really great work and have managed to find communities of people who are interested in doing that work.
Brenda Dayne lanced a podcast for knitters called ”Cast-On,” nearly four years ago, when podcasting was pretty new. Although it wasn’t the first knitting podcast (it was the second), it was the first to use the magazine format, and the first to keep a reasonably steady episodic format. The Cast-On community, is wonderful, and Brenda is an exceptionally good podcaster (which is why the podcast has endured and I think continues to succeede), but I think the initial “breakthrough” was very much due to the fact that Brenda got started very early in the emergence of the niche.
Linus Torvalds wrote this thing called Linux beginning in 1991/92. By my count the source code for no less than five UNIX-like operating system kernels is available and production-ready (Linux, OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Darwin; though the BSDs+Darwin are diverged from the same code. Three is also a big number). Nevertheless, Linux is by far the most successful open source UNIX-like kernel around, in terms of developer energy/activity, and the size of the user community. While Linux code is good (I’m told, it works well for me, but I’m not terribly discerning), and I have a lot of respect and appreciation for the way Linus leads and organizes that community; Linux hit in 1991/92 when there weren’t other free/open source UNIX-like systems around, and when the Internet was just beginning to be able to host and support a project like the kernel. If BSD had been around and liberally licensed in 1990? I very much doubt that Linux would be very much more than a footnote.
There are other examples which I’m fond of citing. Wendy Johnson and Stephenie Perl-McPhee’s started blogging right at the beginning of the knitting craze in 2001, and were among a very early core of knitting bloggers (that included people like QueerJoe and so forth). Kottke, Sparky and the rest of the people, who I think did a lot to define blogging in the early days, lived (almost without fail) in New York City and San Fransisco, which is I think a case of using face-to-face encounters to promote online projects.
I’m not sure if that totally captures the social/cultural components of success, but it’s a start. I think I’d like to spend some time, in a follow up post thinking about iterative progress and Agile Development and how these ideas relate to blogging, and entrepreneurial projects. But that’s another project for another day.
Onward and Upward
tycho garen 05 August 2009