The Silence of Success

Today is one of the most exciting days of my life. It represents the culmination…ok, not the culmination, but the beginning of the culmination of 10 years of work. Today I launched a project which, to the casual observer, may seem like no big deal, but when you understand the numbers in aggregate, then it starts to get pretty interesting. As an entrepreneur I’ve been trying to build “it” for 10 years, and this is probably “it”. And yet I don’t feel like talking about it. I’m forcing myself to write this post, because I feel like I should write something, but I don’t want to.

What’s interesting is that over the years, I’ve blogged about all sorts of things, and I’ve been excited to write about them, and yet none of them represented the success I feel today. Now that I do feel some sense of “success” I don’t really care what anyone else thinks and I don’t have much motivation to share. It reminds me of a friend of mine who launched a network of dating websites several years ago, but he never advertised what he was doing. By all accounts he was quite successful, but if you asked him about it he’d just say “I make enough to take the wife out for a hamburger now and then.” If I asked him how many employees he had he wouldn’t tell me. He was the anti-braggart in the extreme, almost secretive.

How many other successes are out there that we never hear about, because the creators of that success keep mum? How many “successes” only seem successful because they’re hyped so much, when in reality there’s little behind the curtain?

Does my desire to keep quiet mean what I’m working on is finally going to be my big break through, my big success story? Maybe, maybe not. I think it’s got the best chances of anything I’ve done in the past 10 years, but that’s not saying much. I’ll know better in a year or so. Until then, you may not hear much from me.