#1 PageRank on Google! This past Friday, my website ranked first on Google search results. 

While routinely logging in to edit the backend of my website, I accidentally hit the name rather than the URL on Google. To my surprise, the website I tirelessly built from the ground up each day over this past year ranked first place. 

What were my key takeaways? 3-fold. 

1. Get comfortable doing the uncomfortable. 

I am not a CS major, nor do I love programming. So, when starting to build my site, I contacted many friends who were CS majors at Michigan and professionals in the industry. While it did seem intimidating at first and I got quoted services in the tens of thousands of dollars range, I was able to get a general sense of all my options. From there, it was all about just starting and the incremental decision-making along the way. You do not need a complex degree to solve all problems. There are too many problems that entrepreneurs will face to have a formal degree in each. You just need two things: one, be a problem solver and, two, be resourceful. 

2. Big goals are often intangible and difficult to track. Doesn’t mean don’t track it. 

We often don’t realize that many of our priorities are intangible: maintaining strong relationships, having a positive impact, increasing satisfaction and happiness, etc. This can make it difficult to track such priorities. This often leads to minimal progress being made to properly curate a life that optimizes for such priorities. In my experience, much of marketing on the internet can be a black box, driven by a complex algorithm with millions of inputs going into the results that we see and often take for granted. Although it was hard to pinpoint a winning strategy to rank, the best I could do is consistently post, push consistent updates, and improve the functionality/design. At the end, it was about the smaller more consistent steps that made the end goal attainable. 

3. Show up each day. 

While it’s easy to see that I ranked #1 on Google on the surface, what most people do not see is the behind the scenes. Launching the website was physically painful. Not only did it require numerous all-nighters to launch in time, but it meant that I was at the office this past summer most days developing until the last train home at 11:58pm, arriving home at 1am to continue designing and building the site. 

All in all, I have found a deep satisfaction in the journey of taking a foreign task with limited know-how and consistently figuring it out by being a resourceful problem solver.