Good fuel: coffee and the fear of failure

When confronted with a mental challenge, my first instinct is to say no and run away. I don’t think I’m entirely unique in that respect but it’s something I really should stop doing.
“Oh, no, I can’t do that. Beyond my ability. Maybe we can acheive a similar result in a different way that I already feel comfortable doing,” I think to myself. Or maybe I just panic internally.
On the outside, my clients hear a lot of “I’m not sure, I don’t know, and that’s not as easy as you might think” as I scribble notes about what they want and how I might acheive it. It can’t be a pleasant or confidence-inspiring meeting technique but I always promise that I will do my best.
Which is invariably better than I think it’s going to be.
After a meeting with WWJ yesterday, I was in full panic mode. They wanted generally reasonable changes to the functionality of their site, completely within their business model. But they all involved custom coding the PHP. I’m a crap coder. How was I going to do any of this?! Yikes.
But fueled with coffee after dinner, I did most of it before I went to bed at 3. And I was up at 7:30 hacking away at PHP-Nuke again.
I’ve added access restrictions to the content, created a new block to display the top viewed articles, added teaser text to article listings, separated out content by categories and generally made innumerable little changes. Today I am working on the look and feel of the site. I will get this all done!