15 years of bad numbers

This month marks the 15th anniversary of the launch of my first side project — a blog about my then-chosen field of sports media. I wrote it to supplement the reporting I was doing for my college paper. I’ve written a blog in some form ever since. Side projects are the story of my career.

But let me rephrase that opening line, because celebrating 15 years of anything sounds too attractive to capture the truth of what it’s been like. So here we go again:

This month marks the 15th anniversary of seeing bad numbers.

Of course, I stopped checking analytics for my personal writing years ago, but for a time, every month or so, I’d battle with my ego. That inner voice wanted me to stop. The numbers were small. The numbers are STILL small. But is that really why anyone should do a side project? Is that why we write?

Side projects are your creative workouts. They’re slingshots for your skills—launching you forward, further and faster than most jobs allow for. Where so many people get stuck in theory, hoping to identify THE right answer, we know the truth: the act of doing reveals far better answers.

And so we decided long ago to stop acting like experts and start acting like investigators. That act of snooping around a problem and rooting out interestingness and honing our skills and our thoughts rarely leads to anything big. It won’t really show up in the numbers that this work matters. But it all matters. It all contributes to our body of work — which is all a career really is, in the end.

If we did this stuff purely to see big numbers (or else), imagine how worse off we would be.

I wonder where else in our work we can apply that same notion…

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