Bijan Sabat wrote a great post this week on Believers versus Non-Believers. His best quote:

Believers will do whatever they can to make it work. They are committed past the point of return. A team of believers is unstoppable.

We have spent the past ten months working on a new project, a new idea, and Bijan’s words ring so true. New projects, I have found throughout the years, always take on a roller coaster feel emotionally. The excitement of something new, starting over, gives way to the feeling that no one is going to care.

I would go through, for lack of a better way to put it, bouts of depression. This invariably would leave me useless for a few days, staring at code or doing the little things that don’t really push the project forward. I would then feel guilty about not getting anything done, which would then effect my sleep, which would make me more tired and more depressed than I was before. It’s a vicious cycle.

This, I believe, is why a partner is so important. Mine pushed me forward in these times, suggested I call on a few potential customers, got me moving in the right direction again. (I’ve done this for him plenty of times through the years, too.) It’s a long, hard slog… at least it is if you are trying to build something meaningful. And eventually my belief kicked back in and I would roll again for a few weeks or a couple of months before the cycle repeated.

I think about this when I read what analysts say and when I read product reviews. Someone is pouring their guts into these products and no matter what we say on the outside, it has to hurt when your product gets ripped. I feel for the folks at RIM, I feel for the folks in the webOS division at HP, all those people who poured their lives into Symbian and Meego, who have just been hammered day after day, month after month, by the technorati. There are people behind those machines.

And so Bijan’s second quotable quote rings true, too:

Startups exist in a world dominated by non-believers. They are surrounded by this all day long.

Stick together, Believers. We are the ones who make change happen.