When is good 'good enough'? A lot sooner than you think.
Setting myself an outrageous challenge has so many ripple effects for me. First and foremost, as I've written before, it gets me out of my head, engages my creativity and forces me to ask for help. And all those things are conducive for greater success.
But they almost always have unexpected consequences. It should have been obvious to me that if I am going to appear on 100 podcasts in 2022, then I'm going to connect with lots of new people. And perhaps it should have been clear to me that if I'm going to do that, then I'm going to be asked a lot of questions and get into a lot of conversations about these things that mean a lot to me - creativity, getting out of our work way, getting our work into the world.
In a conversation with Claire Pedrick this week for the Coaching Inn podcast, which will be out for you to listen to in May, many ideas were sparked. Claire - who also has a writing practice that has made a lot of difference to her - even made a joke about it: 'Who's going to write a blog about that one first, Robbie?' That one is one I'm going to leave for Claire, but what came to mind as I sat to write today was something else that came out of our conversation: when is good 'good enough'?
When Claire said in our conversation that I almost immediately thought: maybe that should be the title of the fourth book in the 12-Minute Method series. Or at least the subtitle. The current working title is How to Share You're Work When You're Scared. That, of course, was the impetus of the 12-Minute Method, really: how do I become someone who can share things I've made without it tying me in knots? And practising that every week for five and a half years has done it - I no longer feel that rising anxiety when posting a blog. I am changed.
Around the time that my coach Joel and I created this writing practice, I was deep in Steven Pressfield's work: constantly looking for ways to navigate my propensity to listen to Resistance and procrastinate to hell. It slowed me down impossibly and it held me back from so much.
One of the frames that made a lot of difference to me was the Pareto principle - the 80/20 rule. Pareto was an Italian economist who observed that 80% of the land in Italy belonged to only 20% of the people. It turns out that this ratio happens (often even more extremely) almost everywhere you look: you wear 20% of your clothes 80% of the time, almost all the books sold on Amazon are copies of the same small group of books (think how many copies of Harry Potter and Brené Brown books have been sold, and compare that to how many tens of thousands of obscure specialist books exist (including this excellent one, of course, about productivity and procrastination).
I used the 80/20 rule to combat Resistance. I was talking to a client about it this week: I explained to him, after we'd been speaking about procrastination, that he could expect typos in the emails I sent him. That's because I realised when experimenting with 80/20 that at least 80% of the value in my emails happened after the first draft (that doesn't always stop me wasting time redrafting them, but it does help). So, mostly, write an email, proof read it once, send it. Or at least, try and err that side of email writing, not the write it, redraft it fifteen times, sit looking at it for 30 minutes and then send it. It was good enough long before that.
That of course is also the lesson of the 12-Minute writing practice; essentially good is 'good enough' long before you think. Usually - and certainly with a bit of practice - it's possible to write an article that is in sentences, contains the relevant idea and helps people very quickly. As Claire pointed out to me this week, most books only have one idea in them. And so you could retell that same idea over 80,000 words in a book to make sure it is 'good enough'. But often, you can tell the story of that idea in just a few hundred words.
And so the answer to 'When is good 'good enough'?' is: a lot sooner than you think.
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
The first 12-Minute Method Book - How to Start When You're Stuck - is out now!