When You Get Knocked Down

Wow, I wish I was that cool.

My website go hacked.  Not this one, the other one I was building to take over for this one.  After nearly a month of preparation, I was almost ready to launch my new website.  I had worked very hard to make sure that it was the way I wanted it to look, tweaked every little setting, found just the right colors, and spent generally too much time getting it the way I liked it.


After putting it off for longer than I had wanted to initially, I was ready!  I had written, edited, and re-written the opening essay.  I was going to launch it to the world with a lot of gusto.


Then, the day I logged in to post my article, my password didn't work.  Huh?  I tried again, pretty sure I hadn't recently changed my password.  Then I cruised on over to my homepage to find one very like the picture above (I didn't save the actual image because I was annoyed).


Great.  So here I was, everything in place, and someone comes along and hacks* into my webpage, ruining everything I had spent so long preparing.  All my work designing - gone.  All the thought and effort, wasted.


Honestly, I was tempted just to give up on the entire thing.  For real.  I had this whole inner monologue going on about the situation.  "What am I doing anyways?  No one's going to read a blog that I write.  Look, all this work and it just ended up getting hacked anyways.  Now you have to start over.  Who even knows if this will be worthwhile?  Look how much effort it is just to get a decent web page up and running, let alone creating something that other people will find valuable and worthwhile.  It's too much of an uphill battle.  I should just quit before I get too deep into this."


I find that voice accompanies me in many places that I am unsure of.  The voice that tries to predict the future by weighing the effort and pain involved against the potential benefit.  That voice, strangely, always perfectly imagines the pain and heartache I will face.  It never seems to get around to actually imagining the benefits of perseverance.


For example, I can clearly imagine how I will put time and effort into building a website.  It will mean me sacrificing time with my family, time away from entertaining myself, and time away from building friendships.  I will faithfully commit to these efforts, but once I get a website established it will be totally ugly.  No one will like it, and besides, it will be hacked every other week and I'll have to beg Allah the Merciful to knock it off.  When I do manage to produce content that inspires a reaction, the reaction I get will be from people who say that I'm pretentious and arrogant, or mainly to say that I have no talent or unique voice.  And finally, when it can't get any worse, and I finally give up, people will label me as a quitter and failure who can't even do something as ridiculously easy as running a web page.


Once I imagine that, I'm pretty much ready to close up shop.


The voice of my imagination never really gets around to the good stuff.  I never fully imagine what it might be like if I do succeed, and things go well for me.  I think part of it is because I don't always believe that I'm the kind of person that good things happen to.  But when I do take the time to really envision what would happen, it totally fires me up.


For example, let's say I start a blog that is actually somewhat popular.  Now, not only is it popular, but the people who read it are truly inspired.  They stop living boring, ordinary lives and instead start living extraordinary lives that bless other people.  They share their change and are grateful for the work I do.  I release products that people pay real money for and are clamoring for the next one.  I get book deals, and speaking engagements, and consulting gigs.  I'm so successful that I hire a techno-goon to hunt down the hacker, hack into his system and delete all his japanimation movies.  Life is good.


When viewed from that perspective, it seems ridiculous to not at least give it a second chance.  Basically, it's that old adage about getting back up when you get knocked down, and how a good man keeps getting up even when he falls over and over.  It's not the getting knocked down, it's the staying down that will destroy you and your dreams.


Besides, living an extraordinary life is not about putting myself in situations where I am sure not to get hurt.  It's about accepting the reality that life will throw things at me that I'm not prepared for, and that I may have a hard time accepting or dealing with those things.  Even though those things will come, I believe the payoffs will be worthwhile in the end.


So, I am still planning on launching a website, which will be awesome.  I am thinking of something special for the first hundred people who join once it launches, so be looking for that.  I'm thinking that the website will be rebuilt and ready to go in about 1 or 2 weeks.  Unfortunately, the reason I wanted to have it ready before this month is that I'm incredibly busy this month with the school I am running starting on the 28th, so getting the website done and the school running will be quite the accomplishment.  Stay tuned for updates.


Anyhow.  I hope this post finds you on the upswing, where everything is falling into place and things come easily.  If not, I hope it gives you the courage to get back up one more time and do something amazing with your life.


What are some things that help you get back up?
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*Technically, this is not a hack.  It's a crack.  Hacking is when you find some way onto a system that isn't supposed to be there.  Cracking is when you just get the password.