How many RSS feeds do you have in your reader?

How many more would you need to add to be on the absolute bleeding-edge of thinking in your field? 50? 100?

How many more people do you need to follow on Twitter?

How long would it take you to read all that content each day?

I can see that the people who strike real success usually do it by a combination of doing their own thing and striking it lucky - not necessarily by following the trends.

I think that there are a lot of people that spend a lot of time staying on the absolute bleeding edge of technology and web business trends, potentially at the cost of creativity and time to commit to developing and improving their own original products.

I think there is value in learning lessons from others and knowing where the market is going - but I think that one of the things that the most successful products have in common is that they all stood up to lead their chosen market in a particular direction at some point.

And you can’t do that until you quit following the established leaders for a second or two.