So, let me tell you about the last week of March from a work perspective. We have traffic goals that we’re set at the site — no surprise, because that’s been the case at literally every single website I’ve worked at — and, for reasons too complicated to go into, March’s goal went from “oh, we’re definitely going to hit that” to “oh, we have no chance of hitting that” in the blink of an eye about a week out from the end of the month. (It was a technical thing, not the fault of any particular person.) The reason I’m sharing this isn’t to complain, but to tell you that what happened next surprised the living shit out of me. Namely, I refused to accept it.
That’s not entirely right; I knew throughout the entire week that the goal was virtually impossible — there was a chance, but it was the slimmest of slim chances — but, for whatever reason, I just decided to act as if we’d do it anyway. I worked stupidly long hours, I set specific targets for particular writers to write particular stories for me to edit, I just… pushed, for want of a better way to put it, utterly determined that if we were going to fail, at least I’d have tried my very fucking hardest to succeed and no-one could say anything different. I got the bad news, I spent about a couple of hours being upset and mad about the extenuating circumstances, and then I just… went.
Part of this came from the fact that, the week before, when we were all thinking it was a sure thing, I purposefully took my foot off the gas to give myself, and the writers I edit, a break. February and March had been stressful, I figured, let’s all take a breather for a little bit. The numbers are good, we can afford ourselves this luxury. And then we found out the numbers weren’t good, and I felt embarrassed and mad at myself for that decision.
More than that, though, I was just mad. I was mad that, after these past couple of stressful months, the win that looked like it was right there suddenly wasn’t, and I just decided that I wanted it anyway. And if I wanted it hard enough, and if I really, really, applied myself, then why couldn’t I get it? Or at least, get close? As the song goes, anger is an energy… and at least this way, it was one put to good use. There’s a lesson there I should probably take into other parts of my life.
We ouperformed by the numbers by 10,000 by the time the month was done.