The Utter Failure of the Awesomeness Consultant

That's right. It says FAIL. But not at the actual website.

You may at this point be confused and say to me: “What failure?  I’ve read your awesome blog over the course of the last week and if there is one thing you are not sir, it’s a failure.” And I’d nod graciously, thanking you for your generous reverence.  But the fact is, The Awesomeness Consultant once failed miserably.

For those of you who have ever had the occasion to Google the phrase “awesomeness consultant” or on a whim decided to visit www.theawesomenessconsultant.com in the last year or so, you would have arrived at the sad page pictured above.  That sad page is the testament to the utter failure of The Awesomeness Consultant.

Back in December of 2009, being sufficiently convinced of my own awesomeness and feeling the need to share my insights, inspiration, and some humor with the world I decided to start a blog.  And since I believed awesomeness to be of paramount importance, I decided that the blog should be about that. So, I got going and by January 2010 I had:

·         Bought www.theawesomenessconsultant.com as a domain

·         Bought 1 year of hosting for said domain

·         Installed Word Press

·         Wrote a handful of blogs so that I could launch with at least five

·         Created a Facebook Fan Page (click here to see it and like it – since “love” isn’t an option)

·         Created a Twitter Account

By now, you must surely be thinking: “AC, you were getting it in. So how come I have not been partaking of your awesomeness until now? Wha’ happened?!?!”  The answer is simple. I failed.

Please enjoy this bit of dry humor (awesomeness) while I gather my thoughts to explain exactly “wha’ happened”…

Hindsight being 20/20, I can look back and see a few things that I did wrong:

1.      I tried to do too much at one time.

You ever heard the euphemism that goes: “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” Well I missed the memo on that one. I tried to swallow the elephant whole, and if you are not familiar with them – they’re huge. So I choked. I overwhelmed myself with so many things that I never got around to doing the one thing I intended to: Share my perspective. Instead of just writing and posting, I tried to brand, market, and sell my blog before I had even gotten it started.  A Facebook Fan Page and a Twitter Account before I had posted a single sentence….it seems really silly in retrospect.

2.       I wanted it to be perfect.

This is probably what drove the whole “too much at a time” movement. I thought that I had to start off perfectly. And by perfectly I mean with A-class posts on the most visually appealing template with all the bells and whistles. I had to have countless readers digesting my brilliance as I monetized my traffic. But the thing about perfect is this: It’s pretty much what you make it out to be. The idea of perfect that we all seem to hold in our minds, but never actually grasp is an illusion. An imperfect something beats a perfect nothing every day.

3.       I was scared to fail.

Fear of failure paralyzed my action. If I pushed publish and no one liked my blog or, worse yet, even came to read it I’d be destroyed. I was afraid to face that destruction.  And being that scared, who was I to call myself an awesomeness consultant anyway? Now that my awesomeness has grown some man-hair, I recognize that destruction is part of the process. To avoid it is to cheat myself of the growth that surely follows. Not afraid of destruction? How awesome is that?

So now armed with the knowledge of how to eat an elephant, a refusal to seek perfection, and a complete comfortability (not a real word) with failure - the phoenix that is The Awesomeness Consultant rises from the ashes of the dismal failure that was The Awesomeness Consultant. I like phoenixes.

“And that’s good because that’s how you establish a cult”