Love this bit from Kevin Kelly's piece You Are Not Late:
Right now, today, in 2014 is the best time to start something on the internet. There has never been a better time in the whole history of the world to invent something. There has never been a better time with more opportunities, more openings, lower barriers, higher benefit/risk ratios, better returns, greater upside, than now.
(via Shawn Blanc)
Kelly's main point is that the future of the internet still holds many surprises and innovations to come, but really, his statement would be true at any point in time. It reminds me of what Ira Glass said at the end of his recent Lifehacker interview:
Don't wait for permission to make something that's interesting or amusing to you. Just do it now. Don't wait.
And Glass's advice further echos the advice of Radiolab co-host Robert Krulwich, who said in a commencement address years ago:
Suppose, instead of waiting for a job offer from the New Yorker, suppose next month, you go to your living room, sit down, and just do what you love to do. If you write, you write. You write a blog. If you shoot, find a friend, someone you know and like, and the two of you write a script. You make something. No one will pay you. No one will care. No one will notice, except of course you and the people you’re doing it with. But then you publish, you put it on line, which these days is totally doable, and then… you do it again.
I wrote about this a while back in a blog post about the future of blogging.
I had [Krulwich's] words in mind when I started my blog six months ago, and I’ve had them in mind whenever I think I should be pitching one of my blog posts to an online publication like Slate or Salon or The Magazine. I’d like to get paid for what I write, but there’s something wonderfully satisfying about owning and controlling my own work. I also don’t want to wait to see if someone will publish it. I want to publish, and see if the audience comes to me.
The remarkable thing about the internet is that you don't have to wait, you don't need anyone's permission to put your creative work out in the world, you can just do it.
So do it.