A few weeks ago, we launched a project that I’ve been pregnant with for 10 years. As I’m writing this, I’m processing where we’ve been and what this all feels like…
For years we talked about taking the work we do inside our marketing agency and finding a way to make it accessible to more people, the ones who couldn’t afford to hire an agency but still needed to create marketing content. That was our target, but for this writing, the destination is less important than the process of getting there (and not stopping along the way.)
We tried turning it into a course. We refined our content and recorded videos. We worked with coaches to refine it even more. We started, then stopped. Reworked it, and put it on the shelf. We pulled it back down… And nothing really happened.
Then AI came along, and suddenly an idea we’d been carrying for a decade had a completely new way into the world. I’ve joked recently with friends that launching OrangeBall.ai feels a little like being pregnant for ten years. There’s excitement in finally seeing something come to life that you’ve carried for so long.
My friends tell me, “You’ve been talking about doing something like this for a long time.” They’re right, and that’s the part of this story I’ve been thinking about. The ten years in between.
There Are a Whole Lot of Tuesdays
Starting something is exciting. You have the idea and you can see what it could become. You start scribbling in notebooks, talking about it with friends, buying domain names, building plans, imagining the finished version…
On the other side, finishing can be exciting too. You launch the thing and open the doors. Publish the book. Run the race. Get the first customer. Finally, you get to hold something in your hands that used to exist only in your head.
But between starting and finishing, though, there are a whole lot of Tuesdays.
That’s the part we don’t talk about nearly enough. It’s doing the work when the work isn’t particularly interesting, and solving the problems you never anticipated. It’s realizing the thing that took you three days to build doesn’t work, and questioning whether anyone will actually care about this thing when it does work.
It’s all the boring moments. It’s making another call, writing another page, and fixing another bug. It’s one more conversation, and then, trying another version. Sometimes, in the midst of all that, it’s wondering whether you should quit.
Dreams Get Boring
We romanticize dreams, picturing someone with a big vision who refuses to give up, fights through adversity and eventually stands on a stage somewhere telling everyone how they did it. What gets edited out of the highlight reel are the hundreds of ordinary days in between. Dreams can be incredibly boring.
There are spreadsheets involved. There are meetings and emails nobody answers. There are things that break and ideas you were convinced would work that absolutely do not. There are stretches when you’re putting in effort and getting almost nothing back.
That can be dangerous because we tend to interpret a lack of visible progress as a lack of actual progress. Those aren’t always the same thing.
Don’t Confuse Hard With Wrong
This is something I’m trying to learn. Hard, slow, and boring doesn’t automatically mean wrong. The fact that you’re tired of working on something doesn’t necessarily mean you’re supposed to stop working on it. I wonder how many good things never get built because we expected the path to feel more exciting than it actually does.
Sometimes quitting is absolutely the right decision. There are ideas that need to die and doors we keep pounding on that aren’t ours to open. Wisdom matters. We thought passion would carry us. Then passion met Tuesday and the excitement got quiet… we did think about quitting. When the distractions came, and there were plenty, it took a massive amount of perseverance to keep pushing this boulder up the hill.
Keep Showing Up
Getting pregnant and giving birth are the fun parts. Being pregnant in the middle can be just plain uncomfortable. That’s where your “keep-showing-up-ability” gets tested.
Maybe there’s something you’ve been carrying for a while. A business to build, a book to write, a relationship to restore, a healthier version of yourself you’re trying to become. Maybe you’re in the exciting beginning. If you’ve been doing this for awhile, you might be close enough to the finish line that you can finally see it. Most of you are probably somewhere in the long, boring middle, wondering whether any of this is actually working.
I can’t tell you whether you should keep going. Some things require persistence while others require the humility to change direction. Here’s my advice. Don’t quit simply because the work stopped being exciting, and don’t assume nothing is happening because you can’t see anything happening.
Slow progress is not the same as no progress. Some dreams arrive quickly. Others spend a decade teaching you how to carry them, or require a bunch of ordinary Tuesdays that eventually makes everything else possible. You might just need to stay pregnant and keep going when it feels like nothing is happening… yet.
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Curious About What We Built?
Check it out: OrangeBall.ai
