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Holy cow you stole words from my brain! But, after battling with this feeling for a while, I've finally come to a working solution.

The mistake I was making was taking other people's results as the lesson. That led me down all the wrong rabbit holes and left me feeling exactly as you do.

What I now do when I listen to Mixergy or any other startup stuff is treat it as stories and try to learn what experiments to run, what to test within the framework of my work.

I do not let any of it derail my own plans.

This means I don't randomly read or listen to stuff any more. When I am working on my site's marketing, I will go and find some marketing material. If I'm working on A/B testing, I'll read up on that.

And finally, sometimes I just have to let go and watch some random stuff because I do enjoy it. It's like war stories to me.

Don't get down. If you're really not getting much work done, then just shut it all out for a bit and get the work done.

I've found it helpful to take notes and try to implement just one or two of the easiest things afterwards. The strategy has worked well and I more than recoup the monthly cost.

This problem can be cloaked in many different ways: What feature do I implement right now? Should I go to the Python meetup tomorrow? When should I read the sci-fi book that guy recommended? Do I push for the refactor that the code base really needs or the refactor that the client can afford? Should I be answering the phone more or answering it less? Should I cancel my Mixergy subscription? If I can time-afford to attend N events, what is the right mix between developer and non-developer events?

I make a hundred micro-decisions a day that lead to me not shipping. For each decision or decision category, I can give you some reason that makes some amount of internal sense in its immediate context. But ultimately I think I am incapable of really rationally understanding how tens of thousands of tiny choices affect my trajectory over the course of a year at decision-time.

The second generation of the problem is that other people have the problem, and it has a trickle-down effect. Jim irrationally wants to put out a short-term fire vs the long-term solution to the problem. He may do this over my protest. How interested am I in shipping the project, and how interested am I in not butting heads with Jim? It is extremely hard to get the mix right between acquiescing and putting out the fires, educating Jim, and cutting him loose, and that is literally the difference between accomplishing nothing and shipping dozens of products a year.

It's really a problem with rationality in decision-making.

Aside from the cash-rich/cash-poor discussion, which has some merit, the problem is that harvesting useful information from startups is tough because there's a vast amount of selection bias going on. Everybody who succeeds believes that the things they did helped them succeed. This would seem obvious. But the math doesn't work out. The problem is that most of them are much better at telling their personal story than drawing useful conclusions.

I think that somebody like PG is starting to see enough samples that he can make some broad and rather useful statements. I believe you may be able to start teasing out the signal from the noise once your sample size gets into the hundreds or thousands. But the vast majority of this is just people sharing their own experiences -- and sometimes being a bit reluctant to dive into the juicy details. Nothing wrong with that, and as you say if nothing else there's a lot of solid things to learn also. You have to be careful to clearly understand whether you're buying the steak or the sizzle.

When I consult, I make enough to spend it on a lot of things, and I have. For instance I love being a pro member of SEOMoz. But after a couple of years of membership, I'm just now thinking I have a handle on using it to gather real returns, and the return rate isn't worth the investment right now -- no matter how much sales I'm making. Same goes for a few other helper subscriptions. To me having the cash doesn't change much: I'm still left looking at an industry that makes people feel as if they're well underway to internet riches or whatever instead of actually sending them there. This isn't meant as a ding against anybody doing it. It's just a damned difficult subject. If anything, having the cash to buy whatever I want makes the problem much tougher. Suddenly I'm awash in all kinds of content and services that each require attention and all promise incredible returns if I just follow along. Do you have any idea how much regular content is pushed out each month for folks interested in business?

I used to listen to a lot of pop-business audio. Stuff like "Learn to master NLP and increase your sales overnight!" I found that while I enjoyed a lot of it, it just didn't have immediate value. When I thought about how disappointed I was, I thought about quitting. But there was always that next one. Surely it would pay off. Out of maybe 50 of these things 2 or 3 actually paid off (and they paid off in a big way). Looking at the startup-helper community, I get the same feeling, only more so. I don't feel cheated or anything, I just feel like what people want -- feel-good useful-sounding advice and encouragement -- and what they need are two entirely different things.

Yes, if you get one lead that converts it's easily worth it. Say a 5% conversion rate, you'll need 20 leads to make that happen. If you learned something that gets you 20 leads, and if they convert at that rate, then it's worth it. Congratulations. Track those leads and come back to us with some numbers. You know, it's entirely possible that you could be generating leads that don't convert at all. Or they could convert at a higher rate. We just don't know anything at all right now.

I hate to sound like an asshole, but I don't want others to go down this same track. Too many times you just listen to the audio, get excited about the possibilities of what can happen, take a few notes, make a few changes, then move on to something else next week. You're purchasing an emotional experience, not leads. Yes, the leads appeared. That's a number. Work the numbers, not the feelings.