Scott Porad

Customer service e-mail.  I genuinely love answering customer service e-mail.  Seriously, I’m not making this up.  I find real, genuine joy in helping our the fans and users of our web sites.  It makes my heart feel warm and smiley.

But, I’ll tell you, it backs up quickly.  Not to mention, there are a million other things we have to do at Cheezburger.  That’s the thing about building a web site: it’s never over—there are always improvements that can be made.

Honestly, sometimes it’s a little overwhelming and the never-ending-ness of it stresses me out.  Not in a horrible, ulcer-causing way, but in enough of a way to be a constant thread in the background.  Oh brother, how are we ever going to scale this mountain, I think.

What I’m trying to do is not think about it.  Thinking gets me nowhere, but doing results in progress.  To help with that, I keep a list of all the things to do which is important because that reduces the background noise in my head.

Lately, I’ve been focusing on just plugging away at things one item at a time.  They say that when you’re doing actual mountain climbing that you just need to keep on putting on foot in front of the other.  Don’t look up at the hill…just take the next step.  That’s what I’m trying to do.

If you’re a regular reader of this space, you know that I talk a lot about the metaphor of the journey of a thousand miles and a million steps.  I suppose this post is just another variation on that theme.  The lesson in this variation is that the key to avoid becoming overwhelmed by the size of the mountain is to simply focus on the step you’re currently taking, and don’t think about the next one until you’re done with the current and ready.