(Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes)

Listening to Dave Gray at WordCamp in San Francisco on May 30 was inspiring.

The internet is scale-free, which means the rich get richer. Which means the barrier to entry gets higher and higher. Since it costs almost no money to create a website ($100/yr if you do it all yourself), the barrier to entry is measured largely in time. Real time, wall clock time, not computer time.

How do you get around this? Obviously, no one wants time to just speed by. That would suck.

Here’s what I’m doing: I’m filling the time with learning about every single thing I can about websites, WordPress, PHP, HTML and CSS, design and graphics, writing of all kinds including copy writing, then acting on everything I learn.

Most people won’t do this. Most people won’t get through “The Dip.” Most fishermen won’t fish in the rain either… but if you’re willing to fish in the rain, you can sure catch a lot of fish! Here’s the deal: fishing in the rain isn’t just uncomfortable (you get wet), rainy conditions call for different fishing techniques. The water gets muddy. Fish can’t see the bait as easily. You have to adjust.

On the internet, “local” conditions can change instantly. Google can tweak their algorithm by changing some parameter by 5%, and you might lose search ranking immediately. I’ve seen it happen on my site. That’s definitely raining on my parade, especially when I was getting less than 20 hits per day. When this happens, you have to adjust!

When you take the longer term view and deal with changing conditions as a natural part of the process, like weather, you’ll be able to deal with minor disasters. Having tons of high quality content means that even if 15% of your sites are temporarily tooled by search engines, the other 85% are still going strong… provided you’re playing the game straight yourself.

Posting compounds on itself. If you post every day for two years, you have hundreds of articles. It becomes really difficult for someone with fewer articles to catch up with you.

Programming is similar: if you get a little bit ahead of your colleagues on a programming project, it becomes very easy to not only stay ahead, but to pull even further ahead. Here’s how it works: When you’re ahead, others having to understand what you are doing have to spend time NOT programming… but you can continue to program… you pull even further ahead each day, simply by getting a little bit ahead at the beginning.

Keeping up with changes in technology is similar. Stay on it a little bit each day… or fall behind forever!