G LENN DAVIS, THE GUY WHO FOUNDED Cool Site of the Day, once told Danny what he thought made the net great. He said, “Suppose there’s this young kid in Podunk, Connecticut. He runs a site about a niche, weaving wicker baskets, or naked piano-tuning, or what have you. In another age, that kid would probably have toiled in obscurity, but now he can discover that he is the best wicker-weaver or nude piano-tuner in the world. And he learns, as the rest of the world learns, through his website.”

Now, to Glenn, that was a good thing. Such was the youthful optimism of the net.

Well, we’ve been monitoring what can slow down a maker, and we’re not so sure of this whole “ meritocracy equals good” thing. We think it’s those kids from Podunk who are keeping you down.

Neat organizing tricks contribute about 30% to efficiency and productivity. The other 70% is about motivation. And, frankly, constant exposure to all the world’s most wonderful hackers can act as a great demotivator to even the most iron-hearted beginner. How many times have you had a cool idea, googled it, realized that about 50 other people have implemented something similar, so didn’t bother to take it any further?

The problem is that over time, the web has become a Massively Parallel Distributed Network of Kids in Podunk. Everywhere you look, people are doing things of such great coolness that you hardly feel you can keep up. This magazine is full of these sorts of things. Your RSS aggregator is dripping with such excitement.

Depending on your mood at the time, the whole idea of a world of excellence might fill you with sickening dread. At those dark moments, the web becomes that horrid machine that Douglas Adams once conjectured, the “total perspective vortex” where, at any one time, you know exactly how many people were ahead of you in the queue when God gave out the ability to play poker, learn the accordion, hack Xboxes, or lip-sync to Romanian pop songs.

Well, speaking as the 43rd and 72nd world experts in cheering up dispirited geeks, respectively, allow us to speak to your horror, and thereby lift your spirits.

First, let’s add some perspective of our own. As part of the Life Hacks research, we met and talked to some of these paragons of productivity. Let us reassure you, they’re precisely as screwed up as you are. Possibly more so, actually.

Behind every successful geek is a trail of barely mentioned (yet spectacular) failures. We never see this, because most of us, even in our most confessional bloggings, put a little bit of shine on the work that’s being done.

Don’t try to compete with the entire internet. Your RSS aggregator is called that for a reason — it’s glomming together the best of millions. You don’t have to be as good as all of them.

If you’re ever frozen into inaction by the kids from Podunk, here are a couple of practical tips to switch your “spectator/participant” toggle switch.

First: Hack the net’s tendency to catch both the good and bad. Don’t try and learn from your geek heroes as they are now. Almost certainly, they’ll be less intimidating if you look at their work from five or ten years ago, when they were blundering around as much as you and had their own heroes that they could never live up to.

Back in Glenn’s time, the kids from Podunk didn’t have a history on the net. But now we all do, and the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is your friend. So, if you’re awed by Tim Berners-Lee, Glenn Davis, Dave Winer, Guido van Rossum, or anyone in the contents of this magazine, do a little exploring. Find out how they started and emulate that — if you can.

Second: Hack your awe of someone else for your own use. A friend of ours really wanted to get into Linux Kernel development but had no idea how. Rather than just file a bug he found in the kernel, he included a request asking where he should start if he wanted to fix it. Alan Cox, who plays deputy to Linus Torvalds, emailed back with a short, sweet suggestion. It wasn’t much, but our friend was so in awe of Cox that it made his week and kickstarted his coding.

As long as you’re prepared to take on a share of the work (rather than just fawning or drive-by flaming), the heroes and heroines of the net are happy to point you in the right direction. And the narrower your hero’s focus might be, the more impressed he’ll be that anyone is paying any attention to him. You never know, you might become his hero for being so interested in his hobby. We’ve seen it happen. Kids from Podunk are just looking for other kids to play with.

Learn how to reel in your mind at Danny O’Brien’s lifehacks.com and Merlin Mann’s 43folders.com.

Make: 15