#11: Just fxcking ship it already
Starting before you're ready and what the creative process actually looks like.
Dad’s fully vaccinated, yay! Drinking his favourite Red Stripe beer with him in celebration of Fathers’ Day today. Shout out to all the fathers, the mothers who fathered, and the folks who became exceptional adults despite not having a father around. Today’s for all of you.
When I started this newsletter, I wasn't ready.
When I started freelancing, I wasn't ready.
Heck, when I started adulting, I wasn't ready.
I'm still not ready. Inside, I am kicking and screaming and praying that someone takes me back to high school and the comforts of having no responsibilities and no reason to get out of bed on a Saturday morning. Or maybe I'm romanticizing it just because adulthood SUCKS, but I digress...
My point is, a lot of the people who are marginally successful at anything, tend to start before they feel like they are 100% prepared, and there's a HUGE reason for that.
You'll never be 100% prepared. Ever.
The startup community has a phrase they use, "Just ship it," that I adopt as one of my personal mantras. It encourages the mentality that if a product is at 'good enough', i.e. someone will be willing to pay for it in it's current state and be happy with it, then just ship it. Put it out there, and stop waiting until it's just perfect it. Once you see how people interact with it, then you'll have even better guidance as to what improvements to make, and you can do so incrementally.
(Note: "Ship" doesn't necessarily mean actual shipping. It means putting your product or service out there for sale.)
So that product idea that you've been sitting on because you haven't quite figured out how to mass produce it yet. That blog idea you refuse to start because you don't have 50 blog posts saved up. That promotion you won't put out because "what if nobody buys it?!" That goal you want to pursue but you haven't started because you don't have it all planned out. Quit the incessant excuses in your head and JUST SHIP IT!
And there's no better time than the present. We're almost at the middle of the year, which is the perfect time to revisit those abandoned new years resolutions that you gave up on in February. Get back to it and get to shipping as fast as you can, so you can get the momentum to keep going.
I look forward to seeing what you ship in 2021. Good luck!
OMG, have you seen this?
Literally how I get any work done…