Look at those pretty zeroes!
I just learned about about.me, which is yet another site that lets users create online profiles.
The site’s front page says you can create a “personal profile page that points users to your content from around the web.” Seems to me that the ideal “personal profile page” is your very own website, over which you have complete control…but of course that would be the opinion of a professional website creator, wouldn’t it?
Regardless, I was curious enough to create a free account. I customized a few basic things on my profile, mostly so that I could claim the personalized URL about.me/wendycholbi. It’s a fairly easy and painless process.
And the first thing I saw as soon as my profile was created was a screen full of zeroes.
Really big zeroes, in fact. Click the picture to see the exact real true size of the screenshot I snapped. I know, right? The zeroes take up the entire screen!
My first reaction was something like, Geez, are the people at about.me trying to make me feel bad about setting up a brand-new profile? Because those those were some seriously in-my-face gigantic monuments to my own insignificance. Zero views. Zero clicks. Zero links to me. And of those zero views, zero of them happened today.
I mean, why not make those zeroes a little more discreet, at least when you first sign up? Because of course nobody has viewed or clicked on or linked to a profile that is mere seconds old.
Zero history
But then I started thinking about how, as soon as one person (or robot!) viewed my profile, the symmetry and purity of that row of zeroes would be destroyed. Permanently.
So of course I had to grab a screenshot before that happened! And I grabbed one of my history, too, since that was another weirdly beautiful page full of huge zeroes.
And I remembered how it wasn’t that long ago that I had zero RSS subscribers. And zero newsletter subscribers. And zero buyers of my products. And zero money in my PayPal account.
I don’t have screenshots from all those occasions, but I remember. I remember feeling insignificant and unseen and small and lost and overwhelmed.
I remember how it was painful to even think about checking my statistics, whether it was Google Analytics or AWeber subscribers or E-Junkie buyers. Because even the possibility of facing those zeroes again was just too much.
No wonder that seeing the gigantic zeroes in my about.me profile brought that all up again.
But here are two interesting things:
One, now is different from then. And different matters. My business has grown, and so have I. The places where I had zeroes in the past? Now have actual numbers. I do actually have subscribers, clients, readers, website visitors, and cashflow. And though there are still plenty of places where I get to start from zero, that doesn’t mean I’m starting at The Beginning of Everything. The anxiety I felt when looking at my about.me zeroes was tempered by my knowledge that I’d gotten past zero before. Many times, in fact!
Two, looking back at my previous zeroes, I can see more clearly that even then, I wasn’t starting at The Beginning of Everything. I did have things I could count on: Friendships, family, work experience, trust in my own ability to learn new things, the willingness to even dare to call myself a business owner and an entrepreneur. These are things I call roots, the things that sustained me even though all those zeroes were staring me in the face.
So now, yes, I can now appreciate the strange, ephemeral beauty of today’s new-profile zeroes. Because even though I’ve immortalized them with screenshots, they will eventually change (just by linking to my own profile in this post, I’ve changed at least one of them already).
We all start here. All the time. It helps me to remember that. How about you?
