A sturdier foundation
A maple tree makes a lot more helicopters than it needs, just in case. (Image by Hans Braxmeier)
As part of the marketing for the The Carbon Almanac, which will be released next month, the volunteer team launched an email series called The Daily Difference on May 1.
I participated in writing and editing the Almanac, but I’ve been a bit too busy winding down The Little Middle School to work on the marketing phase of the project. However, I’ve kept an eye on what the team is doing, and one message that Seth Godin sent to the team prior to the launch of the Daily Difference series caught my eye.
In it, he said that the goal was have 200 emails written, edited, and ready to go prior to launch.
This makes perfect sense. With 200 emails in the queue, the series will be stable and sustainable. It won’t depend on any individual to be the one to turn the crank. No one will be subjected to needless stress or have to stay up late trying to meet a deadline. There’s time for the research to be thorough and the writing, thoughtful.
Seth exhorts us to ship creative work, but he’s never suggested that we ship before we’re ready. So how do we know when we’re ready? That’s the tricky part that we have to figure out. When are we doing what’s necessary to give our project the best chance of success, and when are we stalling and hiding?
Deciding that 200 emails are required prior to launch and setting a deadline for that launch — that sounds like doing the work to me.
Futzing around with one email for two weeks, adding and subtracting commas? That’s a project that’s getting farther away from becoming a reality as the days go by.
Writing 200 emails is real. It’s a commitment. It’s hard to imagine writing them and then deciding not to ship them.
And as tempting as it is to publish the first email right after it’s written to start collecting feedback, writing all 200 emails before shipping the first one is a good way to focus on the work instead of the reaction to the work.
If I were going to launch something today — I wouldn’t. I’d follow the lead of The Carbon Almanac team and build a buffer between me and the future. I’d generate a pile of content before releasing the first piece. These days, I prefer a sturdier foundation than I’ve required in the past.
When I started shipping this blog, I didn’t have any extra posts written. Over the past few months, I fought and clawed my way to the point where I now have a few weeks’ worth of posts ready to ship at any given moment. That has changed my relationship with the work. I can take more risks and try new things. I can prioritize differently. And I can sleep in!
Some of us do our best work on the tightrope, when we’re one stumble away from being surrounded by police tape. But it’s not necessary to live that close to the edge. We don’t have to ship our work the second it’s complete. And it might not be complete when we think it is. We might need to build something sturdier than what we had thought we needed.
The world is full of abandoned blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, and social media accounts. People lose steam and get distracted, and perhaps that happens long before they’ve accumulated a war chest of 200 pieces of content. But there’s something about the deliberateness of that 200 goal that appeals to me. Setting that specific intention is a powerful move toward ensuring that a long-term vision will become a reality.
