Ben and I met for coffee in the middle of 2015 to catch up on what each other had been up to, and I can say that although we didn’t exactly use these words, it was the underlying theme for each of us now that I look at it in retrospect.

In my case, I’ve been running a publication that produces lessons for practicing software developers, and I’ve been at that for half a decade now. It’s been a rough road at times, and more than a few times I wondered how to keep things going or whether I should even stick with it.

When Ben and I talked, we went over the idea of what success looks like, in the sense of both what I was looking to get personally out of the work, and what I had hoped my audience could get.

I was in the process of moving this from a solo publication to one in which I do active collaborations with other members of the software development world, and I was trying to think through how to make this all work.

I started to think about what success would look like for me and my collaborators… and what that ended up looking like in my head was an incredibly fast and durable feedback loop: Conversations with readers who were invested in the topics we were covering, and a feeling of connection and idea exchange. This was the biggest thing I could offer to collaborators, the biggest thing I could offer readers who were paying to support my work, and the biggest motivator for me too.

So I started working on that. Started thinking about what a very active group of dedicated programmers would look like. Started focusing on the goal of having conversations around the work EVERY DAY, not just once a month or every couple months whenever a new article dropped.

In doing that, I pretty much ended up building a whole new sort of service in which the publishing supported the readers/learners, rather than just focusing on the other way around. The end result looks something like this:
http://practicingdeveloper.com/2015/12/22/the-joy-of-a-collaborative-writing-process-practicing-ruby/

This whole process was hard and it took more out of me than almost anything I’ve done before, and I’m still (like Ben), mid-air and focusing on where I’m going to land. I had to change SO much just to get started on all of this, and I’m still going through all those changes now.

But I can honestly say that if you’re struggling right now with your work… do as Ben says here. It will help, and you’ll be glad to have done it.