It’s not as hard as it seems

It’s easy enough to get to a job and coast from there. Even if the job comes naturally and feels incredibly easy. But the truth is that what you get out of a job is usually going to be proportional to what you put into it.

I caught myself not two seconds ago missing the glamor and perks of working for a company like Reuters a touch. There’s a ton of respect and immediate name recognition. That’s not the case with blogs out here in Silicon Valley — say, like TechCrunch or VentureBeat. (And yes, TechCrunch counts — because very few I know on the east coast are even aware of TechCrunch.)

So it presents a bit of a unique challenge — how can you leverage that weaker level of recognition and stay toe to toe with the supergiants? Well, I’ll default to my editor’s advice on this one: just win.

Make do with limited resources and go forth to kick some ass. Thankfully, out here, doing just that will bring along a victory lap proportional to the amount of work put in. A true scoop is gratefully rewarded by the community (though sometimes the choice for a TechMeme headline is a bit questionable.)

Things move pretty quickly out here, and it’s easy enough to just get comfortable rehashing press releases and covering spot news. But that’s not my style, and I hope it’s not an all-pervasive style. But it does seem that way sometimes. I just know I get an insane amount of satisfaction actually doing additional reporting for my stories and just doing the footwork.

I haven’t found the right pace just yet for it, but I’ll get back to you on that one. In the meantime, just win.