Beyond success

(Excerpted from Swarmwise by Rick Falkvinge.)

Success can be harder to handle than failure, because it sets expectations. These are some of the most important experiences on how to not make a wild success crash.

The danger lies in not realizing that people will regard everything you say as having much more weight than you place on it yourself. If your swarm is political, anything you do — or don’t do — will be interpreted as a political statement.

Start saying only what you really mean.

Reporters and other people will start asking, “Did you really mean that?” and you will respond with a confused “But wait, I didn’t mean it that way” and immediately risk coming across as a backpedaling second-rate politician. You want to avoid this.

The simplest way to avoid it is to be nice to all people, even to your adversaries.

Getting visibility is hard. Keeping it is even harder.

Problems arrive when everybody in the swarm takes for granted that the current popularity will keep on for the next year or two. When that happens, they will stop working extrovertedly, and start fighting between themselves for all the riches and resources and fame that they see coming. As an inevitable result, the swarm’s success will collapse in months.

As the founder, it is your job to explain that when things appear to be at their peak, all those lavish jobs and expensive toys are farther away than ever. Remain steadfast on the extroverted track, despite the distracting glimmering riches on the horizon, and the fact that the visibility and success will fade.

Eventually people realize there aren’t any riches, at which point the repairs can start.

When you know what it takes to get from A to B, the rest is just execution and inspiration. Therefore, the first step is to tell the world that you’re going to go from A to B, and say what you think it takes to do so, as we saw in chapter 2.

You must put a stake in the ground and start executing the project, and work by trial and error. As we’ve seen, iteration speed is key. Try, improve, adapt, try again. Iterate, iterate, iterate.