After literally passing out for 10 hours after getting back from Church Tech Camp : Dallas, I’m back on the computer.  There are a couple of reasons that you should “unplug” from the internets, and one of them is when you’ve just spent an entire conference geeking-out.

If you find yourself in this position, you should, after a brief moment of clarity, unplug immediately.

I’ve done that this morning and I now feel refreshed.

There are going to be (I hope) a lot of posts coming your way highlighting some of the great conversations I had with people that I’ve “met” virtually as well as a few that I’ve never met before.  Church Tech Camp : Dallas had a number of goals, and that was one of them.

I think we accomplished it with style.

One of those conversations was about the idea of “getting started”.  It’s understandable.  We had a lot of people who were deep in the space and many people who were not.  But we’re all starting something.

A good friend of mine passed an article about how the now infamous Google Mail or Gmail started.  I think it’s worth a read and is a kind reminder to us all that all great things didn’t start with a cataclysmic nuclear blast… they started small, and built up over time:

We starting working on Gmail in August 2001. For a long time, almost everyone disliked it. Some people used it anyway because of the search, but they had endless complaints. Quite a few people thought that we should kill the project, or perhaps “reboot” it as an enterprise product with native client software, not this crazy Javascript stuff. Even when we got to the point of launching it on April 1, 2004 — two and a half years after starting work on it — many people inside of Google were predicting doom. The product was too weird, and nobody wants to change email services. I was told that we would never get a million users.

Once we launched, the response was surprisingly positive, except from the people who hated it for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, it was frequently described as “niche”, and “not used by real people outside of silicon valley”.

Now, almost 7 1/2 years after we started working on Gmail, I see [an article describing how Gmail grew 40% last year, compared to 2% for Yahoo and -7% for Hotmail].

And we know this, right?  Christ didn’t start his ministry til 30 years old.  Apparently, many of us have forgotten this.  I include myself as guilty here.

Just because you have glorious aims of being awesome and the fact that you aren’t right now shouldn’t stop you from starting today.

So just do it.  Start.  Begin.  Now.