There is this quintessential image of a writer trying to write at his desk but unable to. A pile of crumpled paper that he keeps throwing into the bin, every now and then, when his writing frustrates him.
In today’s digital world, there is no such visible pile.
But in my experience, there’s still a lot of invisible piles when I write. Just that either they are in the recycle bin, or they are in some folder on my laptop.
Or even worse, these piles are invisible because they never get formed – due to the delete and backspace buttons on my keyboard.
In reality, this pile of crumpled paper (visible or invisible), I have realised, is part of the process of becoming better as a writer. It also means that I am producing lots of junk before I produce something decent.
Or it might also mean that I am not getting easily satisfied. Earlier, when I started, I didn’t have too much in this pile. Perhaps, I was eager to publish most of what I wrote. Over time, lately, I have started to have larger piles of crumpled paper so to speak.
Recently while thinking of this pile of crumpled paper, I came across a website which calls itself the Google Graveyard. It lists the projects that Google started and then killed – some of them in a couple of years, while some of them saw a life of fifteen years before being killed. Some of them never saw customers while some had been in the market for long.
It just filled me with awe that a major company like Google which got popular for allowing employees to take up projects in addition to their work also kills the same projects over time. They fail and fail big time. They fail in huge numbers. Some 290 of them when I checked last. Perhaps, that is why they succeed big time for the ones that don’t get killed.
The website is called killedbygoogle.com. Check it out.
They have a huge pile of crumpled paper.
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