It turns out the world is not crashing down

This is the eleventh article in the series of my 30-day writing challenge.

We’re hosting a free webinar on how to build your personal brand as designer on Thursday, October 13. If you’re interested in learning more about getting yourself out there and how to start writing, sign up!

It’s easy to write when everything is going great. I’m filled with self confidence, and I‘m ready to share all of my smart decisions, and success. When things aren’t going so well, it’s tough as hell for me to get an article out.

I think that’s because I’m searching for some message, or lesson, but I haven’t found it yet. I want my writing to be useful for the people who take their time to read it. So when things aren’t going as planned, I don’t have some brilliant message to share.

This is something that Jason Zook speaks about a lot. He shares his struggles and even his most troubling times openly with his audience. I really admire his honesty, and I end up getting the most out of those articles. I either learn something new or I just feel better knowing that there’s someone else out there who has been through what I’m going through.

So in that spirit, I want to share with you what happened to me today, and I hope that this will be more than just a sob story, and maybe make you feel a little bit better if you’re also having one of those days when the whole world feels like it’s crashing down.

We’re gearing up for the launch of the second batch of The Side Project Accelerator, which is exactly 2 weeks out, and there’s a million tasks left to do. Actually, maybe 2 million. If you’ve launched a product before, then you know that it might just be the most stressful thing in the entire world.

This is our second launch, and it hasn’t gotten any easier this time. In fact, it’s significantly harder. This time we know so much more and want to implement all of the things we learned from our own experience and from the brilliant mentors and podcast guests we’ve interviewed. One of those ideas is a way to create some early buzz before the registration actually begins — a secret, 48-hours only pre-launch sale for our most loyal community members.

We set tonight as the deadline to have everything ready on the new Side Project Accelerator website and open up the pre-launch sale. This deadline was in no way realistic. Not only did we have an incredible amount of work to do, it’s also the holiday season in Israel and the past 2 weeks have been filled with days where we were only able to work half days or not able to work at all.

Still I worked more than 30 hours in the past 2 days to try to get everything ready, but there was just too much to do. As the day wore on and it became obvious that we weren’t going to finish in time I almost cracked.

I was so frustrated that we had missed our deadline. I really felt like shit, and I just started thinking that we were fucking up this whole launch, and that it wasn’t going to be successful.

This is a really dangerous state of mind for me, because once I start thinking that things are going badly, I can get sucked into my own head and my negativity becomes consuming . We suck. Our business sucks. I suck. Everything sucks. You get the picture.

Sagi and I set aggressive goals for ourselves and for Hacking UI, and that often means biting off more than I can chew. This is probably one of the reasons we’ve had success in the past, but it can also lead to some serious self doubt if we start missing those goals. Once we set that deadline, missing it made me feel like we were total failures.

I stepped away from the computer for the first time in what felt like days, and took a deep breath. At the end of the day this was a deadline that we set on ourselves. If we missed it, the world wouldn’t come crashing down.

I thought about it again and realized we don’t really need to do the pre-launch. It was just a tactic after all. We may miss out on a few sales, but life will go on. We could then take the time to finish setting up the new site properly, improve the on-boarding, and even add in a few bonus goodies for the Accelerator members.

Things started to like a little brighter.

Our main launch is on October 26, and we’re already miles ahead of where we were at this time for the launch of the first batch. We have more than 50 people signed up for our free webinar tomorrow and several other webinars planned. We also have a ton of content already published and more that’s waiting to be published.

I remembered what it’s like to breathe again. The world isn’t crashing down after all.

Like I mentioned above, we’re hosting a free webinar on how to build your personal brand as designer on Thursday, October 13. If you’re interested in learning more about getting yourself out there and how to start writing, sign up!