Blowing off a little steam here so bear with me.

Part of the process of learning is learning that those who may have ‘made it’ (or seem to have ‘made it’ or are at least trying to convince you that they have ‘made it’) still deal with the same frustration they had on the way up and that you may be having now. Senior sales associates have bad prospecting days and bad clients they can’t seem to shake, artists deal with creative blocks more often than you would believe, and general creative types have projects that they fall in love with that somewhere down the line seem to morph into sentient beings whose sole purpose is to torture and torment their creators. I’m about to share with you on such monster I had to slay unexpectedly.

This time last year, I was in the process of giving up on the current iteration of the You Already Have The Answers / Today’s Quote & Question Website (the information is still live at http://youalreadyhavetheanswers.wordpress.com). Now, I am in the process of mentally killing two website projects that were launched at the beginning of this year because I am being drained of all my energy by all the work that goes into them.

You Already Have The Answers had the luxury of being a project that was years in the making, with some sort of daily quote or weekly question being published in some form online that turned into a full years worth of daily content ready to go a year before I even launched the website. Most of the upfront work was complete, and the bulk of the ‘daily’ work consisting of making sure the write up for the day’s quote and question was still relevant to the time (as I said, some were written almost two years prior to my 2010 launch of the project).

I took an inadvertent hiatus from posting to this blog on April 1st of last year, and within a few days lost the will to pick it back up. Turns out that I had made a major victory in the gathering of content around the concept. I will probably never know if I had a real winner in the concept itself because I was receiving no response. It was a daily blog / Twitter / Facebook / email send off that was bringing back no responses. And it was wearing me out.

As it turns out, being a ‘friend’ and posting that the dog is sick or that there is drama in your life that of course is not your fault is good fodder to pull in more than a few comments. Attempting to create coherent conversations with these same ‘friends’ doesn’t really work as well. This is even true for the celebrities and social media gurus using the internet and social media sites, although you may have to look a little harder to see it. They may attract huge numbers in the way of followers and actual responses, but you’ll find the bulk of those responses fall into the ‘you’re so awesome’ worship category or the ‘me too’ parrot category.

You Already Have The Answers never really worked as a way to garner conversation online, so I reluctantly moved away from it, and although drained from all the hard work, I had sincerely hoped I would find something soon to fill the void with something that I could love just as much, but would have its potential actually show some potential. So far, nothing really has.

I now sit on the verge of killing two other projects that I have put a lot of work into that both have daily components. One is Monday though Saturday, the other seven full days a week. Neither of them is as beloved as You Already Have The Answers, but both of them were created in part to fill a need for another love of mine, money. And they are not making any, and I’m getting the same feelings I did last year. I am getting a little tired of being a lot tired from putting in the all the time it takes to get these projects done.

I am not killing them, at least at the time of this posting, but the temptation is so there.

The key to dealing with the frustration of failed, failing, or frustrating projects and tasks is to make sure you are learning something from them. I learned so much about the process of editing my own stuff working on You Already Have The Answers that it has become second nature to proofread my work multiple times before publishing–even if it may not actually help any efforts to produce texts with fewer spelling and grammar mistakes. It also sold me on leaving the safety of Blogger as my blogging platform of choice, which I am very grateful of.

Sometimes you just stop working on things. You lose funding, time, or desire, and stop. I have learned there is nothing wrong with that, especially if you took the time to pick up a few lessons about your abilities and yourself before you pulled the plug on the project.

And a little time away can lead to a fresh approach if you find yourself renewed with the spirit to get back to that dormant project.

Image Source flickr/fireflythegreat