There's also the "hero night." It's pulling off an all nighter to accomplish a seemingly impossible task with a hard deadline. This happens about once a year, and it was in April for me this year. The company had 24 hours for an opportunity to be on national TV, but we needed a landing page built, with a contest, and a Facebook integration. Small company means you gotta take the chance.
Grabbed my earbuds, fired up my Spotify, and got to work. Got it done and deployed a couple of hours before airtime in the morning. It worked great. Unfortunately, the TV spot didn't pan out quite the way we were told, and it didn't provide much value after all, but everything I built worked. I would have felt terrible if the opportunity was in fact huge, but what I had built was subpar.
It's a nice feeling to be the hero, even for yourself. But it's also easy to overvalue a success like that and assume that it will always be that way, and always be the hero. Unfortunately, it turns into "stupid hour" most of the time.
Grabbed my earbuds, fired up my Spotify, and got to work. Got it done and deployed a couple of hours before airtime in the morning. It worked great. Unfortunately, the TV spot didn't pan out quite the way we were told, and it didn't provide much value after all, but everything I built worked. I would have felt terrible if the opportunity was in fact huge, but what I had built was subpar.
It's a nice feeling to be the hero, even for yourself. But it's also easy to overvalue a success like that and assume that it will always be that way, and always be the hero. Unfortunately, it turns into "stupid hour" most of the time.