Write Anyway

I always told myself: don’t wait to have something to say to write, write and you will figure out what you’re saying.

It’s the only way you’ll ever surprise yourself with your writing.

Otherwise I fall prey to procrastination, excuse making, inconsistency and defeat. Throwing in the towel before the fight starts.

I look back to my first podcast experiment (I call it an experiment because it helps let me off the hook for giving up on it), the Idea Machine. It was a game show where people sat around and came up with ridiculous business ideas. It was fun, lasted 12 Episodes, and it was far from perfect. The 12th Episode was much better than the 3rd.

By virtue of delivering every week for 3 months, I got better at the show. Better at editing, hosting, fleshing out the format.

The last episode aired two years ago. Two years since I quit the project. If I never stopped, I would have been up to episode 114 right now. Makes me wonder how much better episode 114 would have been than episode 12?

Now I’m on another podcast project, all about optimizing sleep. Sleep.ist is for people who care about their health, but don’t sleep as well as they’d like. Six episodes in and I already want to quit. Seth Godin calls it “the resistance” – the voice in our head that will make any excuse possible to stop doing the project.

Every week is a grind, but I know that if I quit this week, and never release episode 7, I’ll never have a chance to see how good the show can get at episode 70. Every week is a silent mental war, a battle with scheduling, prioritizing and excuses. But at the end of that journey, every week is a sense of victory that I wouldn’t have experienced otherwise.

It’s not about the listener count or even the quality of the show, it’s about shipping every single week. It’s about being a professional, even when you’re not getting paid.

That’s what most great people have in common, the ability to show up one day after another. To keep going until they can’t go any further.

Let’s see how far the Sleep.ist goes.