I suppose this is somewhat of a tangent but if you bear with me, I believe this dovetails nicely with the focus of this blog. Last Friday, I went through one of the most terrifying situations a parent can go through – having surgery performed on a child. In my case, my son is two years old.
Sure, in my case, the operation was minor, and the doctors were the best doctors in the world, but nonetheless – no surgery is minor and no doctor is immune from making mistakes.
So after an agonizing period of waiting while specialists, anasthesioloigists, and nurses paraded over to check on him while we waited for the procedure to begin, they finally took him into the back room to sedate him. The poor child had a look of sheer terror on his face while the doctors tried to calm him. One nice inhale of “the gas” and a wide-eyed look put him in a deep sleep.
My wife and I were allowed to go and grab a bite to eat in the cafeteria and were summoned a short time later to come be with our son. He was coming out of his drug-induced sleep and had been numbed from the waist down as well, so he definitely wasn’t feeling pain – we were told.
As parents, we sat there with Devin holding him and stroking his hair. He was miserable and the heart strings were being tugged as we sat watching him in discomfort. As parents, this sort of thing is agonizing. You hate to see your child uncomfortable.
The nurse, who I am sure is very experienced and very knowledgeable, kept trying to calm us and tell us things like “He can’t feel anything”, “This is normal” and “he’ll go back to sleep for a bit”.
At one point, the nurse looked and said, “I’m going to give him another dose of the pain medicine. He shouldn’t be waking up so soon. At another time, the monitor went off because he wasn’t getting enough oxygen. So the nurse fetched him an oxygen mask and made a comment about how it was very odd that he wasn’t getting oxygen.
The point of this very long and windy entry is that people that run an internet business, including bloggers who are monetizing their blogs, can easily fall into a pattern of the expected. It’s relatively easy to read entries here at ProBlogger and other sites that talk about optimizing sites for search engines, how to make title tags efficient or how to garner the most traffic and ad revenue. Like this Johns Hopkins nurse, there are notable experts in fields that will make their wizardry seem easy. And following the advice of experts will usually put you ahead of the crowd.
However, the one factor that cannot be quantified, measured, explained or predicted is the human factor. Despite the fact that our blogs and businesses are internet-based, they are based in humanity – a humanity that is unpredictable, emotional and takes different shapes for different humans. Sometimes all the 10 step processes and tricks don’t work because there are humans in the picture messing the formulas up.
Fortunately for us as bloggers, one size doesn’t fit all and when one formula fails, chances are we can find one that works in our situation with our personalities.
