Great advice from David Kadavy’s Love Mondays newsletter today:
The main difference between pro and amateur creators: Amateurs expect everything to work.
So, the amateur leaves in their wake a trail of half-finished and failed projects.
The pro also leaves a trail of half-finished and failed projects, but by a different name. They’re called prototypes.
The amateur tries to film a new series. The pro puts together a “pilot.”
The amateur tries to write a book. The pro writes a “first draft.”
The amateur tries to build fully-featured software. The pro ships version “alpha.”
This is particularly timely for me as I’ve been working through the Write Faster, Write Smarter series from Chris Fox this past week. (Not that I have any desire to write a novel, but I do want to write more, both for work and for myself.)
Chris emphasizes building the lifelong habit of daily writing sprints in which you work towards writing the unthinkable 5,000 Words Per Hour. This is accomplished by writing for a set time, without distraction, in near stream-of-consciousness style (no editing whatsoever).
Despite many setbacks and failed attempts in last weeks, I finally sat down for a good 40 minute stretch this morning, during which I wrote nearly 1,000 words for a blog post I started working on a month ago.
I’m also scheduled to revisit a new podcast that’s in beta (but which I gave up I nearly a year ago) and hope to get feedback on a prototype for a paid CE podcast.
This idea that calling things beta-versions and prototypes is actually a helpful way to avoid perfectionism, and one I stumbled upon last year for purely being fed up with having so many ideas that go nowhere.
So, yes, I have a trail of half-finished projects prototypes. And I’m ok with it.