This is a nice quote from Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress:
“I smile these days when I see WordPress referred to as an “overnight success,” if only they knew how long an overnight success takes.”
Trade Me is another example.
Founded in 1999 it became an overnight success in 2006. :-)
Indeed the long night, I gather its because people just don’t want to comprehend that all good things pretty much take quite a bit of time and hard work, and instead search for magic moments where everything suddenly changed.
Its true I think, there are sometimes leaps along the road, magic moments, tipping points where things change significantly, but these are products of the larger force of constant incremental progress and hard yards.
Doing the hard yards in the dark doesn’t sappear to have been sold very well to most people, maybe its the years of movies glamorising the isolated moments and focusing on the quick emotional wins from the visibly exciting times.
Waking up to a day that you’ve worked all night to create doesn’t sound so bad to me.
cheers,
tim