Keep the Fire Burning
A Ceremony for Days Without Applause
I launched an app this weekend.
Said plainly like that, it doesn’t sound like much. But behind that one sentence sits a year of work, a hundred small decisions I didn’t know how to make until I’d made them, more money than I’d like to admit spending on lessons I couldn’t have learned any other way, and me being a woman of an age that required me to learn what it even means to use an app before I could ever dream of building one. I’m feeling grateful and also a little stunned that it’s actually launched. I also know this is just the beginning.
I’ve created a ceremony for you - and also for me - because what nobody tells you about launching something new is that the first day is easy. Of course it’s easy. The people who love you show up, the ones who’ve been waiting show up, and there’s a current running through everything that makes it feel inevitable. Excitement is cheap on day one, because day one hasn’t asked for anything except the courage to hit go.
Day two is where it gets honest. Day two depends on what day one gave you back, on whether the response matched the hope you’d been silently carrying. Most things take time to build momentum. And during momentum-building, the current of excitement shifts from enthusiasm and excitement to decision. It’s you, alone with the thing you built, choosing again whether to keep tending it.
The people who make it are rarely the most talented, or the best funded, or even the ones with the best idea. They’re the ones who kept showing up on the days nobody was clapping. Calvin Coolidge said it better than I can:
“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘Press On’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”
Persistence is what every real beginning asks of us, once the applause thins out. So today, on the other side of the launch, I’m doing what I know how to do when persistence is needed. I’m adding fuel to my inner fire. I’ve created a ceremony to make this work sacred - and life being sacred, as you know, is my great motivator!
