When I was fifteen years old, I was invited by my math teacher Ms. Hill to join a merry band of overachievers on a nerdy pilgrimage to a week-long college enrichment camp.

A few weeks later I found myself piling into the back seat of Ms. Hill’s rusty Toyota Corolla and driving three hours down the highway to Queen’s University, tightly wedged between a couple of cute girls with pointy hip bones.

When we arrived for our week-long tour, we were treated to private rooms and all-you-can-eat buffets and told to sign up for a college mini-course. I watched the girls sign up for Philosophy and German while I went alone to Computer Science. But I was excited because the topic for the week was “How to make a website.”

This was a big deal. I was actually going to spend a week making a website! The internet was brand new. And I got to spend the whole week learning basic HTML and JavaScript. The instructor taught us how to visit other websites and press “View Source” in Netscape Navigator to read their code.

It gave me an idea. Maybe I can make a website that will be huge.

I spent the last two days of the class giving birth to “Neil’s Haven of HTML and JavaScript.”

I spent an entire day getting the title to look the way I wanted it to. By researching HTML commands, I made the font big, italicized, bold, lime green, on a purple background, and, of course, flashing endlessly.

Neil’s Haven of HTML and JavaScript!

Neil’s Haven of HTML and JavaScript!

Neil’s Haven of HTML and JavaScript!

The site launched in May 1995. It gathered and shared all my JavaScript and HTML code to help others build their own sites. My whole goal was to answer important, pertinent, and crucial questions for other website builders such as:

How can you make your title flash in lime green?

How can you get an endlessly winking smiley face?

How can you add a perpetually bouncing ball?

Now, let’s remember that this was 1995 and the internet was all chisels and pickaxes. We’re talking years before YouTube, Google, Wikipedia, or Facebook even existed. Nobody had internet access except the occasional rich family with a Compaq Presario in the corner of the family room they’d use to dial up Prodigy to show guests the slow-loading red Yahoo! logo. Everyone would gather around the thing like a campfire to watch ten giant red squares slowly load into a hundred smaller red squares slowly load into a thousand tiny red squares… slowly load into the word Yahoo!

By the end of the week I launched my site, and when my high school library got internet access on one computer a few weeks later, I was able to type in my website address—complete with numbers, backslashes, and tildes galore—and show my friends at school.

Jaws dropped.

Everybody was amazed.

Nobody had a website.

And look at that stat counter on the side of the page! It was already over 100 hits. Who were those people? Where did they live? What did they wear? How did they find the site and what had they gotten from it?

It didn’t matter.

The high I got from those 100 hits was incredible.

Every chance I got, I went to the school library to check how many hits I had. Each time, I saw the number go up by a few hits. It took me a while to figure out that most of those 100 hits were from me during the week I had built the site, because there was probably no way for anyone else to find the site even if they wanted to.

But still, I begged my parents to get a computer over the summer so I could keep working on my site and we became a Compaq Presario and Prodigy family, too.

And then suddenly my website went down.

I guess some bearded dude in a Pac-Man T-shirt at the university computer science department cleared his cache or something because one day my website just disappeared. I felt frustrated, but I was hooked on the feeling of building and sharing something with the world.

Over the next fifteen years I started a lot of websites.

A lot of blogs.

A lot of ideas.

The goal was always the same: to see how many people I could get to come visit.

Fifteen years.

Fifteen years.

That’s a long time. An eternity. This is the giving and giving and giving and giving and getting nothing back the whole time stage.

And how do we know when we’re giving and giving and getting nothing back if we’re really going the right way?

We can’t see up the invisible staircase, right?

So how can we trust the path when it feels like loss after loss?

Well, we need to remember that losing isn’t always bad.

Sometimes it’s the exact step we need to be taking.