I’m in love with verb [ICT]. I am. I can’t help it. I gave birth to my internet baby on Monday and I keep looking at it and cooing and feeling this intense burst of pride and happiness.
But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. It’s possibly the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. I’m exhausted. I haven’t managed to squeeze in more than 6 hours of sleep (that’s being generous) in over a week. I feel like I am constantly going. Moving. Emailing. Typing. Calling. Googling. Trying to find another goddamn Creative Commons photo that fits a story.
The timing has proven to be interesting. I received a promotion at my day job that coincided with verb’s launch. As in, the site went live on the exact same day that I started working in my new role. So let’s talk about stress for a moment. Because that and fumes are basically what I am running on. And adrenaline. Man, lots of adrenaline.
90% of the time, I think this is what I was meant to do. Create. Build. Make cool shit. Monday - launch day - was a high like I’ve never experienced. As one of my co-conspirators said, “Can we launch something new every day? Because this is awesome.” But then I look at the days and weeks and months in front of me and I realize that the workload isn’t going to shrink. It’s going to grow. And I’m going to be getting 6 hours or less of sleep every night for the foreseeable future. And I’m going to be a perfectionist about every photo, every word, every link, every decision. And then I think about the people who are counting on me to make this work. To turn a profit. To make it stick. Last. Mean something. That’s not an insignificant amount of pressure.
But it pushes me. Drives me to be better. To learn to manage people better. To learn to make better decisions.
Even after four days of a live, awesome site, I feel like I’ve aged four years (luckily it doesn’t look like it… yet). I know so much more than when I started.
Maybe giving birth to an internet baby isn’t that much different than giving birth to a human baby. It changes you. It pushes you to be the best you can be.
And it’s really, really rewarding. It’s also really, really tiring.
But I wouldn’t change a second of it.
