Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 18 seconds

Frustrated Joy

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 18 seconds

That moment when you hear some really wonderful news.. That you aren’t allowed to share with your PLN just yet, so you share it with your family. And it takes 20 minutes to explain to them what your PLN would have understood in 30 seconds. And you wonder if you might try to share it confidentially with someone at work, but you know if it’s gonna take another 20 minutes to explain it, it will deflate you.

The joy of it isn’t going away because I can’t share it and celebrate it. The joy is still there.

Do I question the value of what I’ve achieved if no one around me gets it?

Except my kid. She somehow immediately understood what had happened to me and wondered if it would happen to her, too. Strangely, though she wanted it to happen to her without having particularly achieved something, I guess the idea of it appealed to her. Or maybe she’s just that age where everything mom does, she wants to do. Or perhaps it’s that my joy rubbed off on her, but no one else felt it in the same way.

But what if all the work I’m doing makes no sense to people around me? Is it less valuable because people don’t understand it? Or is it just too cutting-edge?

I will always remember my boss once saying this in a talk. She was talking about blogging, and it was maybe 2008? And she said something like, Maha told me this was a big thing five years ago but I didn’t realize it until now.

Granted. Lots of what we think now might be big things eventually don’t become big (remember SecondLife? It’s still there but never really became mainstream) whereas other things start slow and their value doesn’t really become clear until they reach a critical mass (Twitter for me). And some things seem insignificant to you but they become so much a part of the lives of people even less tech savvy and digitally literate than you that you seriously just have to keep using them because that’s where your people are (for me WhatsApp and Facebook. No comment. Don’t get me started. I’d have a rift in my family if I left there and all kinds of social problems. Really. It’s very unfortunate).

Anyway. So. Frustratedly joyous, I am, since last night 🙂 Yay me.

Postscript. Today is April 13 and the reveal is at #ccsummit in Toronto. That I was chosen to be one of the women in the Uncommon Women coloring book. Thanks to Kamel for tweeting me my first sneak peak

And at 4pm EDT, we’ll do vconnecting with Kelsey Merkley to unveil the whole book… Here’s a link to all VC sessions from that conference

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