There’s something I want to talk about, but frankly, I’m a little embarrassed to do so. However, I write with my former self in mind, and my former self would want to know about this. So here I go. I want to talk about how to be somebody. What do I mean by “somebody?” To be somebody is to be known for your work. To have your name synonymous – or even better, eponymous – with your accomplishments. I used to be “nobody.” Now I am “somebody.” I am known in some circles for my work. My work has led to accomplishments I’m proud of. My work and I are one. There have been many steps on my journey to becoming somebody, but if I had to pick one day, it was September 14th, 2011. That was the day my first book debuted in the top 20 on Amazon. It’s hard to overstate what a massive change it was, in every aspect of my life, to overnight go from an unknown tinkerer to a “best-selling author.” The day I became somebody, my life changed. The benefits of being somebody Being somebody comes with some benefits. Here they are: Career success: This the best reason to become somebody. Name recognition helps you make money for the work you do. The money for the work you do helps you do more of that work. But career success can come in other forms. Being somebody has meant that I’ve gotten speaking invitations all over the world. Thanks to the ones I’ve been able to accept, I’ve spoken all over the U.S., and in eight countries. Respect: When I became somebody, everyone started to show me more respect. Introductions went from, “This is David, he is weird and I’m not sure what he does” to “This is David, he’s a famous author.” (Prior to becoming somebody, I was introduced by a well-known Chicago entrepreneur – right in front of my face – as a “malingerer.”) When I became somebody, my idiosyncrasies and lifestyle choices suddenly weren’t viewed as odd. Instead, they were seen as something you would expect from a creative person who is somebody. Connections: Because I am somebody, I can make connections with other somebodies. If I’m interested in the work of another somebody, I can reach out to that person, and they will generally respond. Or, I can ask for an introduction from another somebody. I’m rarely more than a degree or two away from the somebody I want to meet. This is how I managed to interview many somebodies I admire for my podcast, such as Adam Conover, Elise Baurer, David Allen, James Altucher, Seth Godin, and many more. Dating prospects: When I became somebody, my dating prospects improved immediately. This admittedly has downsides, because you don’t want to be with anyone who wants to be with you because you’re somebody. And if you think being somebody entitles you to love you’ll become a horrible person. But being somebody serves as a signal that you’re trustworthy. Even though, in recent years, many much-bigger somebodies have turned out to not be trustworthy, the social proof that your accomplishments have gained you name recognition counts for a lot in at least getting someone to acknowledge you as a potential mate. Random perks: I’m only known for my work in small circles, but that doesn’t prevent me from being “somebody” outside those circles. I don’t flaunt my somebody-ness, but people Google. Oh, do they Google. There have been many situations where someone has discovered I was somebody, because they Googled me, and then they commented on it. Which means there have been many other situations where they didn’t admit to it. This improves your prospects in a variety of situations. Sometimes that’s intangible, but I know it once at least helped me rent an apartment for a couple months during a mini life. Being somebody isn’t all upsides. I’ll get to more of the downsides later. But if you want to become somebody, how do you do that? Why do you want to become somebody? Before you try to become somebody, ask yourself why you want to become somebody. This can be a hard question to ask and it gets to the heart of why I’m a little embarrassed to even be talking about this. American culture is driven by people desperate to become somebody, but it’s unfashionable to openly admit it’s something you want. What do you want out of being somebody? If you want to become somebody, ask yourself what you expect to get out of it. It might not even be necessary to become somebody to get those things. The best reason to become somebody is to get paid to do what you love, so you can do it more. Being somebody is a job requirement behind many creative professions, such as an author, musician, or entertainer. It’s hard to substitute the benefits of being somebody in these cases. But if you want respect, or for various parts of life to become easier, there are other ways to get those things. For example, you can make connections with somebodies simply by being more outgoing and intentional. A dirty little secret about the benefits I mentioned earlier is that much of the value of becoming somebody doesn’t come from being somebody in the eyes of other people. Much of it comes from being somebody in the eyes of yourself. If you want to be somebody, and you feel you are not, you will have little confidence. If you don’t want to be somebody in the first place, nothing stands in the way of your confidence. And confidence is a big part of success. What are the downsides of becoming somebody? Being somebody comes with downsides and risks, and you should have these in mind if you’re going to try to become somebody. I think I have about the right amount of somebody-ness. The vast majority of people have no idea who I am. A small circle of people respects what I do, and when I meet them, they are always interesting and nice people. As of yet, I have few vocal haters. I am not enough of a somebody to frequently be recognized in public, outside of industry conferences. (One time in my life, I was recognized in a gym, and that went just fine.) I’m not enough of a somebody for it to impede my daily life, such that I would have to be wary of going to public places, or worse yet, followed by paparazzi. I would see those as downsides. The main risk of being somebody is reputational damage, known today in its most-extreme form as being “cancelled.” For many professions, reputational damage can be devastating, but mostly only if your career depends upon others risking their reputations by working with you. If you are an actor, comedian, and perhaps a musician, if your reputation is damaged, you may have trouble getting work. If you are an author, you have to be pretty heinous to have a publisher drop you. If you are a self-published author, you’d have to be even worse. If anything, an author should be so lucky to be “cancelled” (considering it’s for an unfair reason). You’d have to be pretty successful to even qualify to be cancelled, and you’d sell even more books. The best way for someone to prevent being cancelled is to not do awful things. But “tall poppy syndrome” does exist. People may want to cut you down just because you are somebody, because they would benefit by doing so, or other reasons that are beyond your control. Even if the majority of reasonable people are on your side, there are a lot of psychopaths in the world who could make your life hell, and being somebody likely increases the chances of that. Should you become a pseudonymous somebody? More and more people are becoming pseudonymous somebodies, in what Balaji Srinivasan calls “the pseudonymous economy.” Depending on what work you do, you can build a reputation for that work without anyone laying eyes on you or your real name. So, you can reap the career benefits of being somebody, without the personal risks of reputational damage. If your pseudonym’s reputation is damaged, you still lose those career benefits, but hopefully your true identity is still safe. You won’t get the public-facing benefits of being somebody, but you might get the boost in your self-perception that comes along with doing work good enough to be recognized. You can also work under a pseudonym without remaining totally anonymous. In other words, people might recognize your face, but not know your real name. This way, you get some of the public-facing benefits, but prevent your privacy from being violated. I have no idea what Tynan’s real name is, and I don’t need to know. If I could start over, I would write under a pseudonym, but probably still show my face. A big benefit of pseudonyms is you can improve your chances of becoming somebody by making your name easier to remember, and perhaps even associated with the area in which you work. Joanna Penn uses her real name, which would have been a perfectly-chosen pseudonym, since she writes about writing. I can’t help but wonder if some of the success of authors such as James Clear, Ryan Holiday, and Mark Manson can be attributed to their memorable and easy-to-spell names. So many entertainers work under “stage names”, it feels silly to even present an example, but Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson. Are you trying to fill a hole in your heart? The older I get, the less I care about being somebody. I want to be somebody to the extent that it helps me sell more books, so I can write more books. But when I was nobody, I wanted very badly to become somebody. I may think I don’t care about being somebody, in part because I’ve gotten used to being somebody. It’s the “water,” that I, a fish, swim in. Some of it may be that being somebody isn’t quite as amazing as I had expected it to be when I was nobody (though it’s still good). But I have to admit – and this is part of where my embarrassment comes from – I to some extent wanted to become somebody to fill a hole in my heart. If you don’t have enough love in your life, you may search for it in becoming somebody. There are many examples of celebrities who had absent or abusive parents or traumatic upbringings, though I don’t know for sure if that comes out to a higher rate than the rest of the population. I would guess many of them wanted to become celebrities to fill holes in their hearts. Wanting to become somebody because you have a hole in your heart can be great motivational fuel. It can be, like I talked about in The Heart to Start, That Which Pulls You Through. But becoming somebody will not fill that hole. I feel bad for celebrities I see who are constantly in the news, acting out in destructive ways. I hope they’re just playing the “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” game, but what I fear is happening to them is they wanted to become somebodies to fill holes in their hearts. They became somebodies, but still had those holes, and now they keep throwing everything and everyone in their abundant lives into those holes – which are really endless pits of despair. Go ahead and use the hole in your heart to motivate you, but once you achieve somebody status, you better figure out how to fill that hole – because becoming somebody won’t do it. Better yet, get therapy and work on yourself while you achieve somebody status. I hate to give people the wrong idea, but becoming somebody does at least help to fill the hole in your heart. It helps you skip levels on Maslow’s Hierarchy: by achieving self-actualization through your art, you’re better equipped to backfill the lower levels of the hierarchy, such as a sense of belonging. It’s a lot easier to feel like you belong in the world when people respect you more, and when the sacrifices you’ve made and the work you’ve put in for years on end lead to success, and aren’t what you fear they are: the desperate thrashings of a drowning lunatic. But that’s as far as it goes. Beware the somebody cycle I feel bad for big celebrities because I think they’ve probably experienced what I’ll call “the somebody cycle.” I only lightly experienced this myself, but fortunately escaped being sucked in by the maelstrom (perhaps, thankfully, because I didn’t become a big enough somebody to make that maelstrom too powerful to escape). Here’s how the somebody cycle works: You want to become somebody to fill a hole in your heart You work hard, and nobody recognizes your work, for years on end You think to yourself, “I’ll show them,” and work even harder Your hard work (and luck) leads to you becoming somebody Suddenly you get more respect, and people want to be near you People want to be near you, in part, because you have more respect for yourself. So you may interpret even normal behavior from others as a higher level of respect. You think to yourself, “Where the hell were these people when I was nobody?” You get suspicious of people who want to be near you. They’re only “using” you. You become awful to be around The only people who still want to be around you are the ones who want to be around “somebody.” They don’t actually respect you or your work. Your suspicions turn out to be true. The world is full of blood-sucking leeches who only want to use you. Repeat steps 8–11 until you die of a drug overdose Sounds awful, right? I think it’s still possible to become somebody, and not get sucked in by the somebody cycle. Stick to the principles of becoming somebody. The principles of becoming somebody If you want fewer of the downsides of being somebody, and more of the upsides, make sure you’re becoming somebody for the right reasons. Here are four principles to follow on your quest to become somebody. 1. Be curious and passionate By far, the greatest benefit of being somebody is you get paid to do what interests you, and you get to do it more. But success can be a trap. If you become somebody doing something that interests you, the world will expect you to keep following that thing. But what made you successful might not have been your passion for that exact subject, but rather the process of discovery. My first book was about design. I quickly became known as the design guy. I stuck with that for a while, but became less and less interested in design. I’ve since embraced that what I’m actually curious about changes. The passion that actually drives me is the process of getting really curious about a subject, and digging into it, then sharing what I’ve learned. I could still be juicing the design thing, but I wouldn’t be happy. Keep asking yourself if you’re truly curious about your work, and whether you feel passionate about the process you’re following. If not, change something. 2. Do great work You can let your desire to become somebody drive you to work hard, but the ultimate goal must not be to become somebody, but rather to do great work. Somebodies are attracted to other people who are curious and passionate about what they do, and who do good work. 3. Play the long game Jon Bokenkamp, creator of NBC’s The Blacklist, has been on this show, on episode 93. How did I land him as a guest? When I was nobody, and Jon was less of a somebody than he is now, Jon emailed me out of the blue. He liked some design work I had posted online, and wanted to know if he could use it. I did him a favor, and more than a decade later, he returned the favor by being on my podcast. In the meantime, he had created one of the biggest shows in primetime television. From the time we first met, we were both curious and passionate people, trying to do good work. If you stick with being curious, passionate, and doing good work, you’ll be surrounded by many future somebodies. Everyone else is looking for the closest sure win. Play the long game, and you’ll become somebody. 4. Understand media Naval Ravikant says there are three kinds of leverage: you can have lots of capital, you can manage labor, or you can be savvy with media. The books and articles we read, the social media channels we consume, and the videos we watch, are just some of the media that shapes what we assume to be reality. This is easy to miss, because media is the “water” that we, the fish, swim in. It’s possible to get lucky and become somebody without understanding media, but it’s a lot easier if you do understand media. Pay close attention to how the somebodies you admire use media to increase their exposure, and shape how others see them. I’ve written summaries of a few classic media-theory books: The Image, Amusing Ourselves to Death, and – the best book for understanding media – Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. Go forth and become somebody I feel much better now, having shared that. I risked reputational damage by coming off as self-obsessed, but I think my former self would have appreciated reading this. If you feel you have something to offer the world, and would like to be recognized for it, go forth and become somebody! But remember to make it about enjoying the process, and doing work you can be proud of. Image: Evening Shows, Paul Klee Mind Management, Not Time Management now in hardcover! Mind Management, Not Time Management has now sold 10,000 copies! Order your hardcover "souvenir" from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your favorite bookstore. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/how-to-be-somebody/

Systems save energy. Especially if the system helps you with something you do every day. This is why I have a system for cooking. When you’re hungry, you make bad decisions, such as grabbing the quickest food you can find – which often happens to be unhealthy food. My cooking system ensures I never have to think about what to eat, or how to prepare it. It frees my time and my mind, so I can focus on creating. A little disclaimer before I begin: I’m not suggesting you eat what I eat. I have a mysterious chronic illness and am sensitive to damn near everything. This particular diet is optimized for very specific things that apply to me. If you build a system for yourself, you might want to eat something different. The basic principles still apply. Three principles of a cooking system My cooking system is based upon three principles: Batch what you can To batch, prepare what you can beforehand. You save time and energy, and – since many of your ingredients are already ready – you have a healthy meal in no time. As I’ll explain in a bit, in my system, I cut and store vegetables beforehand. This is a little extra work up-front than cutting vegetables before any one meal, but over the course of several meals, it’s less time and hassle. You sometimes have to make compromises for the sake of a system. Pre-cut vegetables are ever-so-slightly less tasty and fresh than vegetables you’ve just cut, but cutting in advance is still a net-positive. Never run out A good system prevents emergencies. After a long day, you don’t want to suddenly discover you have no food, or are missing a crucial ingredient. Even if you had the energy to do so, it would be a waste to run to the grocery store. But you probably don’t have that energy, so you’ll probably order delivery – and that delivery food will not be as healthy as a home-cooked meal would have been, and will cost more. My system is designed to never run out of ingredients. I know the minimum amount of each ingredient I can have before its time to order more. I also know my ingredients won’t go bad because I’ve had them too long. As you use your system, pay attention to just how perishable your regular ingredients are. How long can you keep them? At what minimum supply is it time to order more, so you won’t run out? For example, I have two jars of coconut oil. When I run out of the first, coconut oil goes on my shopping list. I know I’ll buy again before I run out of the second jar. Monotony first (variety later) To start your cooking system, make the same things every single meal. Through repetition, you can gradually sprinkle in variety. Many people think this sounds boring. “I could never do that,” they say. “I could never eat the same thing every meal!” Well, you don’t have to. Eating the same thing every meal is only temporary. It allows you to put together the pieces of your cooking system, such as how often you’ll order ingredients, and what compromises you’re willing to make to have ingredients ready. Making the same things with the same ingredients and the same processes gives you one opportunity after another to optimize your system. When you run out of ingredients or they go bad, you learn how often you need to order. You can also experiment with different processes, and learn how different trade-offs affect the quality of what you cook. Once you have the building blocks of a system in place, you can start adding in variety. Through many iterations of my cooking system, I no longer eat the exact same thing every meal. Many components, such as the vegetables, garnishes, spices, or proteins, can easily be substituted in the same processes to make different dishes. Many people think they couldn’t eat the same thing every meal, but then they continue to do what I used to do: Wait until I was famished, then desperately look for whatever food I could find to shove in my mouth – making bad decisions in the process. If you do this, too, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. You don’t have to eat the same things forever. Try it for a while, then mix in some variety. Categories of ingredients While you may not want to eat my exact diet, there are categories of ingredients that are nearly universal: protein, vegetables, spices, and garnish. Here’s how those apply to my cooking system. Protein I eat a variety of meat-based protein sources. I mostly alternate between ground beef and ground pork, but I also occasionally eat ground turkey. My butcher in Colombia has both beef and pork, and packs them into bags of individual serving sizes. I stack them up in my freezer. At the end of each day, I take a couple packs from the freezer, and transfer them to the fridge. The packs are thin enough, they’ll be thawed by the next day. Vegetables The main vegetable in my system is zucchini. I eat a lot of zucchini. My other staple vegetables are carrots, red bell peppers, mushrooms, cucumbers, and celery. Variability in the sizes of zucchinis has had a big effect on my cooking system. The zucchinis in Colombia are not like Whole Foods, in the U.S., where every zucchini is pretty much the exact same. When I am in the U.S., I can quickly enough make zucchini noodles on-demand with a small handheld spiralizer. But since there’s so much variance in zucchini thickness in Colombia, I use a table-top spiralizer, and store the noodles in a container. You can also buy pre-cut zucchini noodles at some grocery stores, generally not in Colombia, so I’ll sometimes buy these if they’re available and I’m feeling lazy. Carrots, I spiralize if they’re big enough for the table-top spiralizer. Otherwise, they’re cut down to a small size that can cook quickly. The bell peppers and mushrooms are also cut down to size for cooking. Celery is cut into short sticks for garnish. Cucumbers are cut into half-moons, separated from the seeds for longer storage. Spices By changing the spices in a dish, you can totally change the flavor. But, I have one go-to spice mix that I make over and over. It’s a taco mix from a keto cookbook, consisting of chili powder, non-sugar sweetener, salt, black pepper, and some other spices. I fill a Tupperware container with the mix every few weeks. Each time I make the mix, I pay attention to my supply of each of those spices, and put on my shopping list any which are low. This way, I never run out of key spices. Garnish I already mentioned that I garnish my dish with cut celery and cucumber, but I have other things I use in each meal. First, I put on a seed mixture. It’s made of various high-fat seeds: hemp, sunflower, and pumpkin seeds, and sometimes flax seeds. Then, I put on oil. It’s usually coconut oil. Sometimes it’s flax oil. Less often, it’s olive or sunflower oil. My body hates me if I eat a carb, so these seeds and oils help add fat to my dishes, which gives me hard-to-find calories, and helps keep me in ketosis. I also get some extra calories (and fat) by accompanying each meal with avocado. This is as freshly-cut as possible – unless there is some left over from a prior meal. Avocados are just a little too perishable to systematize much, though I’ve gotten better at identifying ripe ones through the avocado challenge I talked about on episode 245. Starches Honorable mention goes to the starches category. As I said, my body hates carbs, but starches would be a key part of a cooking system for most people. You could use a rice-cooker, and always have hot rice available. Pasta would be a little more work, as it wouldn’t be too good if you didn’t cook it fresh every time. The same probably goes for potatoes or sweet potatoes. Then again, you might be able to make all these starches in a rice cooker, which could save a lot of time. My cooking process Now that I’ve talked about the principles and categories of my cooking system, here’s the process I follow. As I talk about some of the decisions I’ve made in this system, you’ll get an idea of how you can build your own system. Step 1: Begin cooking protein To begin, I start the burner and put the pan on the stove. I pull a bag of meat out of the fridge, slice it open, and put the meat on the pan. I then put some of my spice mix on the meat, turn it over, and turn up the heat a bit. I want to burn some of the spices onto the ground meat, for extra flavor. Step 2: Take out other ingredients Through repetition, I’ve figured out the exact order to do each step in my system. Notice that I started the burner first. That gives it a little time to heat up, while I’m removing the meat and unpacking it to cook. It takes time to take so many containers of ingredients out of the fridge, so I do that after I’ve started cooking the meat. Step 3: Begin cooking “round 1” vegetables I could add all my vegetables at the same time, but then they wouldn’t each be optimally cooked. So, I take the extra effort to add my vegetables in “rounds,” based upon how long they will take to cook. At this point, I add my “round 1” vegetables: mushrooms, and if my carrots are sliced and not spiralized, I’ll also add them. Otherwise, they get added later, which I’ll explain in a later step. Step 4: Prepare plate with garnishes While the meat and first round of vegetables are cooking, I prepare the plate, with garnishes. I take a plate out of the cabinet, and add some celery and cucumber to the edge of the plate. Step 5: Break up protein, and add “round 2” vegetables Now that the meat and round 1 vegetables have cooked a bit – while I prepared the plate – I break up the ground meat, and stir it up with the vegetables. I then add the “round 2” vegetables, which is usually just sliced up red bell peppers. Step 6: Cut avocado While the red bell peppers are cooking, I cut an avocado, and add half of it to the plate as garnish. Step 7: Add “round 3” vegetables Finally, I add the “round 3” vegetables. This is my zucchini noodles and – if the carrots were large enough to make noodles – my carrot noodles. Since carrots and zucchinis are of different consistencies, the carrot noodles are sliced thinner than the zucchini noodles. This way, I can add both at the same time, and they will both cook to the right point, in parallel. I’ve been cooking without a cover on the pan this whole time (otherwise the dish would get too watery). But at this point, I cover it, so the noodles get steamed by the trapped moisture. Step 8: Serve Within a couple minutes, the round 3 vegetables have steamed, and all the other ingredients have cooked to their perfect points in the meantime. While that was happening, I’ve put a glass of water on the table, and grabbed a fork. I’ve gotten a measuring spoon and my seed mixture ready, and I’ve gotten the oils ready, too. I serve the entire contents of the pan onto my plate, add my seeds and oils, and I’m ready to eat. Clean up Clean up after this is easy, because I do this all in a single pan. I’m mindful of health effects of my cooking materials, and it seems every one is potentially problematic: Teflon is toxic; once aluminum is in your body, you can’t get it out; ceramic-coated cookware doesn’t last; and materials that are already in our diets, such as copper or iron, may impart too much of those substances into your food. That leaves stainless steel, but then you’re eating nickel. Thus, I use a “21/0”, nickel-free stainless steel pan. This could be the wrong choice for some reason I’m not aware of, but I’m trying. “But I like grocery shopping/cooking” Many people object to this cooking system, saying they actually like grocery shopping, so don’t want to do less of it, and that they actually like cooking. You don’t have to cut down on anything you don’t like to follow a system – just design your system accordingly. This is my default meal, and I can always make it when I want to use my time and energy thinking about something else – such as writing my next book. But, I sometimes make a new recipe, and I have a grab-bag of other recipes I make if and when I want variety – which turns out is not terribly often. When friends hear about my system, they often ask what my partner thinks of it. She actually loves it. I left her out of my description of the process, but when we make this together for dinner, we’re like poetry in motion – our moves are perfectly coordinated, with me cooking things as she cuts vegetables or takes containers out of the fridge. She has grown to like it so much that when I’m not in town, she follows the same system. Start your cooking system Hopefully this gets you thinking about how the processes you follow affect how you use your time and energy, and the decisions you make about what to eat. (A special thanks to Nelson Quest, who once made a YouTube video that no longer exists, which inspired this system.) Mind Management, Not Time Management now in hardcover! Mind Management, Not Time Management has now sold 10,000 copies! Order your hardcover "souvenir" from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your favorite bookstore. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »   Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/my-coooking-system/

Many people think our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived short and miserable lives. In fact, that’s what most anthropologists thought. Until the 1960s, when they looked more closely at how foragers got by. The way foragers “worked” can tell us a lot about the way we, as creators, work. Farming gets a lot of output with little effort No one can be exactly sure when a human first planted a seed to grow food, but this one act was one of the most revolutionary in human history – up there with the invention of fire, or the internet. The agricultural revolution meant humans no longer needed to roam around, searching for food. But, with the innovation of agriculture came some trade-offs. We had to wait for our crops to grow, so we had to stay in one place. But staying in one place didn’t work out-of-the-box everywhere. As anthropologist James Suzman points out in his book, Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots, the first successful cities sprouted up in floodplains. These areas flooded regularly, and that refreshed the nutrients in the soil, which was a must for successful farming, as crop-rotation hadn’t yet been invented. Which brings us to another drawback of farming. Yes, farming gets you a lot of food with little effort, but eventually your once-fertile soil runs out of nutrients. Creative “farming” grows ideas into finished products As creatives, it’s useful for us to “farm.” Plant seeds of ideas. Give them water, sunlight, and fertile soil, and eventually you’ll have a crop of creative products to harvest. I talked in my book, Mind Management, Not Time Management, about “creative systems.” Cultivating ideas takes time. By working with the cycles of your energy to do short bursts of work, and letting incubation do the rest, you can always have creative products to ship. (I talked specifically about my creative system for Love Mondays newsletters on episode 260.) Creative farming is a great way to consistently turn ideas into finished products. But foraging is where you get the ideas in the first place. Foraging is more effective than you think In the 1960s, anthropologist Richard Borshay Lee lived with a hunter-gatherer tribe in the Kalahari desert. He carefully tracked what they spent time on, and what they got out of it. Lee found these tribes met all their needs for food in just fifteen hours work a week. They consumed well over the daily recommended intake of 2,000 calories, and they did it all without farming. They did it by foraging. Fifteen hours a week to get everything you need. That sounds appealing to many of us. Fifteen hours a week is ironically the number of hours economist John Maynard Keynes once predicted we in the industrial world would work. In 1930, in the midst of the Great Depression, Keynes had the guts to predict that by 2030, we would at least quadruple our productivity. As a result, he said, we would work only fifteen hours a week. But foraging doesn’t lead to progress We reached that quadruple-productivity mark way back in 1980. But we still work way more than fifteen hours a week. Why? We can make philosophical arguments about the hedonic treadmill, and how we buy too much junk. But one thing is for sure: We want to see “progress.” These hunter gatherer tribes, who have sadly been all but completely driven off their foraging land by the industrial world, did lead rich lives. They worked for what they needed, they had plenty of leisure time, and everything they did was deeply integrated with their families and communities. But they didn’t have running water, electricity, or modern medicine. Many lived as long as anyone in the civilized world – if they reached adulthood. But they had a high infant-mortality rate, which pushed down the average lifespan. They didn’t have what we consider “progress.” They didn’t wonder if their children would live in a world with human flight, space exploration, or the internet. Each generation’s life was essentially the same as the previous. Creatives need to forage As creatives, we can’t just farm. We need to “forage,” too. We need to wander around, follow our curiosities, and see what surprises we can find. The hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari lived in such a rich ecosystem, they could always feel confident they could find something to eat if they went and looked for it. But as a creator, happening upon a feast is less common. It’s not every day a song comes to us in our sleep, like it did when Paul McCartney wrote “Yesterday.” Or that a happy accident occurs, like when Charles Goodyear spilled chemicals and developed vulcanized rubber. This is why you need to farm what you forage. Forage, then farm, to have great ideas, then make them real Farming what you forage isn’t just a good way to do creative work. If you want to be consistent, it’s the only way. This is hard to see, because we’re working in a world that’s a relic of the assembly line. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, and software developers, themselves, are produced on assembly lines. They follow curricula. They take exams. These exams have bubbles they fill out, so a machine can read them – as long as they’re filled out with a number-two pencil. But, like farming, these professions grow stale, like soil being sapped of nutrients. The curricula have to change, as do the exams. But those curricula don’t change from farming over and over. Someone has to farm what they forage, to change the field. Remember from episode 266 that for Henry Ford to put workers on the assembly line, he had to first farm what he foraged. It took a lot of experimentation and tinkering – from Model A to Model S, in addition to the work he did in two previous failed car companies – before the Model T was ready to be produced en masse. But the soil eventually got sapped of its nutrients. While Ford refused to change the Model T until sales dwindled, other car companies were farming what they foraged – innovating to build better cars. We’re not used to farming what we forage. It’s not how work has gotten done in recent history. But as automation and AI threaten more and more jobs, we’re freed from the drudgery of just farming. We need to forage, too. I talked in episode 250 about how I farm what I forage with my digital Zettelkasten (that article has since expanded into a successful book by the same name). To forage, I explore what interests me – reading books, listening to podcasts, and having conversations. To farm, I take notes, then categorize and connect them. These seeds of ideas grow over time, until I’m ready to harvest them. An idea can grow into a tweet, then a newsletter, then a podcast episode, maybe eventually even a book. Farming = clock time; Foraging = event time Farming and foraging call for different ways of thinking about time, too. In episode 235, I talked about the difference between “clock time,” and “event time.” Clock time’s most recent roots come from Frederick Taylor’s scientific management. Breaking actions down to split seconds was a big departure for farmers who moved to cities to work in industry. But farming, too, was a likely predecessor of clock time. Foragers could usually be confident that if they were hungry, they could find something to eat. When you live in a diverse ecosystem, if one thing is not doing so well, something else is. In fact, when Richard Borshay Lee was studying foragers, there was a drought. The nearby farmers couldn’t grow crops. To survive, they had to rely on outside food aid. The tribe he was studying did not. They got by on foods they had found in the wild. When you’re farming, you can’t count on finding food whenever you’re hungry. You have to grow it. So, you have to think carefully about time. If you don’t plant your seeds, pull weeds, or water crops today, you’ll be hungry a long time from now. This is probably one reason cultures close to the equator tend to think more about the present, whereas cultures in climates with changing seasons think more about the future. When surviving tomorrow depends upon what you do today, you think ahead. If you focus too much on farming, you’ll always be on clock time. If you keep planting the same seeds and growing the same crops, your soil will become sterile. If you focus too much on foraging, you’ll always be on event time. If you only rely on what you find in the wild, you’ll always be living hand-to-mouth. You’ll be waiting a long time between one idea and the next, and you’ll struggle to develop them into finished products. Find a seed with potential, then plant it To farm what you forage, make space to wander. Follow your curiosity, even when it feels as if it will take you nowhere. But when you find something interesting that might have potential, plant the seed. Build creative systems that help you keep ideas growing, without sapping your soil. If you do those two things, you’ll never have famines, and always have feasts. Image: Southern Gardens, Paul Klee About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/farm-forage/

There’s a story I think of every time I’m in the throes of a difficult project. It’s from the movie, Catch Me if You Can, about the infamous con artist, Frank Abignale, Jr. Frank’s Father, Frank Senior, tells him a story: Two little mice fell in a bucket of cream. The first mouse quickly gave up and drowned. The second mouse wouldn’t quit. He struggled so hard that eventually he turned that cream into butter, and crawled out. You hear the story several times throughout the movie. It’s really the theme of the movie. When Frank Junior’s parents separate, he feels like the mouse drowning in cream. He runs away and poses as an airline pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer, forging paychecks and flying all over, like a little mouse, frantically and desperately moving his little legs, trying to find his place in the world. You face The Void at the beginning of a project Whenever I start a creative project, I feel like a mouse in a bucket of cream. Every time I move one of my little legs to try to get traction, it just keeps floating in space. But, I’ve found, if you keep moving fast enough and long enough, that cream turns into butter. I talked on episode 265 about how there are a lot of different sub-skills to the skill of shipping. One of those sub-skills is overcoming your fear of shipping. In other words, facing the Void. The Void is the empty space you need to fill for your project to become complete. The Void is a figurative place. It mostly lives in your mind. But it has literal representations, too, such as the blank page or the blank canvas. The Void is present at the beginning of a project, and that prevents many creators from even getting started. But the Void has other, less obvious, effects. The Void doesn’t just prevent you from starting a project. It also prevents you from finishing projects. The Void holds you back from shipping There are plenty of things to fear as you’re about to finish a project and ship. You fear criticism of your work. You fear later seeing something you want to fix, after it’s too late. As I talked about in episode 267, you face the Finisher’s Paradox: You learn throughout the project, and by the time you’re done, you can already do better. But as you prepare to ship, and you see your perfectionism taking over, or you get shiny object syndrome, if you look deep within yourself, you’ll probably find a fear of the Void. Even though you face the Void at the beginning of a project, your fear of the Void can hold you back in the end of a project. Being in the “butter” is comfortable The fear of the Void gets in the way of shipping for two reasons. One: being in the “butter” of a project is comfortable. When something nebulous starts to solidify, we also sometimes say it “gels.” In either case, where there was once empty space where you couldn’t get traction, you’re now enveloped in something solid. When you’re in the final stages of a project that has gelled it’s like being in a warm blanket on your couch, with a bowl of popcorn, watching Netflix. When you finish this project, you have to face the Void on the next Reason number two the Void gets in the way of shipping: When you finish the project, and start the next, you have to face the Void all over again. Deep down, you know after you let go of that first project, and start the second, you’ll feel, once again, as if you’re drowning. Is it perfectionism? Maybe it’s the Void. So what are you to do? Simply being aware of your fear of the Void is a good start. When you catch yourself, in the final stretch, second-guessing or catastrophizing, simply remind yourself that you’re trying to a-void the Void, and that will help you snap out of it. What looks like perfectionism may not be perfectionism. It may be fear of the Void. Another great way to overcome your fear of the Void is to make sure you never have to face it again. As I talked about in episode 261, we’re taught shiny object syndrome is a bad thing. Working on a project, then quickly getting excited about and switching to another project, is not how traditional work gets done. But it has value in creative work. Starting projects on the side helps you a-void the Void If you get comfortable having a bunch of projects incubating on the side – and you don’t beat yourself up about the fact you may finish few, if any, of them – those projects on the side serve as buffers against the Void. Once you prepare your current project for take-off, you already have another project waiting in the wings. Your excitement for your other projects can even get you more excited about finishing your current project. But every once in a while, you’re still going to find yourself floating in space – or drowning in cream, if you will. When that happens, do whatever you can to keep forward momentum. Brainstorm and prototype, and be okay knowing most of what you come up with will suck. In other words, remember the little mouse, and get those legs moving. Image: After the Floods, Paul Klee About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/the-void/

When Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling, he designed and built his own scaffolding. But, it only covered half of the ceiling. So he painted the first half of the ceiling, then removed the scaffolding. When he finally got to view his work from the floor, seventy feet below, it was as if he were seeing it with new eyes. After two years work, he didn’t like what he saw. Michelangelo faced what I call “The Finisher’s Paradox.” There’s a contradiction that happens when you try to ship your creative work: By the time you’re done, you can already do better. You learned in the process. Michelangelo learned on the job As I talked about in episode 262, Michelangelo “aimed left” when he started painting in the chapel. He had little experience as a painter, and even less experience in the wickedly-difficult “fresco” method. He knew the first panel he painted wouldn’t be his best. So, as art historian Ross King explained on episode 99, Michelangelo started in an inconspicuous part of the chapel. It was the last place the clergy entering the chapel would see, and the last place the Pope would look when sitting on the throne. Michelangelo did have at least one false start. A few weeks into painting the first panel, he wasn’t satisfied with his work. The salty sea air in Italy was staining the mixture of plaster he had chosen. There were probably also some things he wanted to change about his painting style. Once the plaster on a fresco dries, it’s literally set in stone. But, like stone, you can get rid of it if you destroy it. And that’s exactly what he did: Michelangelo chipped away three weeks of work and started over. If Michelangelo learned a thing or two in the first few weeks painting the Sistine Chapel, you can bet he learned even more painting the rest of the 12,000 square-foot fresco – which, in total, took him four years. Michelangelo faced the Finisher’s Paradox So after Michelangelo removed his scaffolding from the first half of the ceiling, he was faced with a dilemma: There was something he didn’t like about his work. Since, while painting on his scaffolding, he was very close to the work, the work looked very different from the floor. He realized the scenes he had painted were too complex. There were too many people on each panel, and, as a result, the people were too small. You couldn’t make out very well, from the floor, what was going on in the paintings on the ceiling. The dilemma then was that he was two years into the work. His patron, Pope Julius II, was a nasty man, known for going on tirades and beating people who disagreed with him – perhaps even worse. He’s gone down in history as “il papa terribile,” or “the terrible” Pope. He had probably even beaten Michelangelo by that point. Additionally, the project was taking a toll on Michelangelo. His back was killing him, from literally bending over backwards to paint the ceiling. So, would Michelangelo do as he did when he first started the project? Chip away all that work, put the scaffolding back up, then start over? Or, would he keep going and ship the work? Michelangelo was faced with the Finisher’s Paradox. He had learned a lot throughout the project, and he had learned even more by finally seeing his work from a distance. Would he fix what was wrong with his work, or would he just ship it as it was, flaws and all? The tale of two (Sistine Chapel) ceilings Since the Sistine Chapel ceiling has lived on as one of the greatest masterpieces in art, it’s surprising Michelangelo saw something wrong at all. It’s even more surprising that what he saw is still there in the final product. If you look closely at the Sistine Chapel ceiling today, you’ll notice something different about the two halves of the ceiling. On one side of the ceiling, the scenes are complex. There are lots of people, and the people are small. On the other side, the scenes are simpler. There are fewer people in each panel, and the people are bigger. When the first half of the ceiling was unveiled, it didn’t seem to matter to others that the people in the paintings were small. Raphael was so impressed by what he saw, he went back to one of his own fresco’s, The School of Athens, chipped away a spot, and in its place painted a likeness of Michelangelo. But Michelangelo, himself, made some big changes to his approach. And these changes seem to have paid off. The very first panel he painted on the second half of the ceiling is one of the most famous paintings ever. In The Creation of Adam, you see God himself, giving life to Adam, from fingertip to fingertip. Like other panels on the second half of the ceiling, there are fewer main figures – in this case, two – and, as a result, they’re bigger, and easier to see from the floor. Do the best you can until you know better In the process of doing your creative work, you learn. This is especially true because nobody can teach you how to do your creative work, with the unique style and idiosyncrasies that make it yours. Yes, there will be creative waste. Much of it goes into building the underwater part of your iceberg. As you get shiny object syndrome and switch from one project to another, as you scrap iterations by throwing them into the fire, and as projects simply fail (for now), there will be delays in achieving success, as you build your foundation. But just because waste, false starts, and failures are a part of the creative process, doesn’t mean you can hide away forever, toiling on a “perfect” masterpiece you will one day unveil. Shipping is a skill, and learning new skills is sometimes scary. Remember from episode 265 that one of the sub-skills of shipping is overcoming perfectionism. Perfectionism is a “humble brag” of a quality. It’s far easier and more comfortable to say you’re still working on your masterpiece, than it is to put it into the world and see how it’s received. But as Maya Angelou once said, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” In other words, beware the Finisher’s Paradox. When you work on a creative project, you learn. Once it’s time to ship, you can already do better. You can’t ship your work without some small part of you saying, “this sucks.” It is better to build in enlightenment than to daydream in darkness. Image: Concert by Louis Marcoussis Thank you for having me on your podcasts! Thank you to Chris Parker at Easy Prey, and Joyce Ling at The Abundance Podcast. You can find every podcast I’ve been on kadavy.net/interviews. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »"     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/finishers-paradox/

On October 10th, 1901 – 120 years ago, almost to the day – the grandstand was full at the horse track in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. But not to see horses. There was a parade of more than 100 of these new things called automobiles, and several other events, including races of automobiles with electric engines and with steam engines. But the main event was a race of gasoline automobiles. By the time the event took place, it didn’t look like it would be much of a race. There had originally been twenty-five contestants. Only three made it to the starting post, then just before the race, one broke down and had to withdraw. So there were just two cars, driven by the men who had built them. One was the country’s most famous car manufacturer. The other, was a local. A failed car manufacturer, named Henry Ford. At the time of this race, the most famous car-maker in America was Alexander Winton. He had made and sold hundreds of cars. He had gotten tons of press driving from Cleveland to New York. At the time of this race, Henry Ford was a failed car-maker. He had made and sold a handful of automobiles, but his first car company had failed. It was clear who was going to win this race: Moments prior, Alexander Winton had set the world record for the fastest mile traveled in an automobile, going around the dirt track in a little more than a minute and twelve seconds. Winton’s car was seventy horsepower. Ford’s was twenty-six. He had never taken it on a turn, and it didn’t have brakes. The race was supposed to be twenty-five laps, but just before the event, the organizers shortened it to ten. According to Richard Snow, author of I Invented the Modern Age: The Rise of Henry Ford, they probably didn’t want to see the local loser lapped over and over. This race was more of a sprint. The Foundation Effect Has this ever happened to you? You pass by a construction site for months, and there’s nothing going on. There’s just a wall with a project logo, peppered with graffiti. Then one day, there’s a six-story building frame there. Now, each time you pass, it’s gotten taller. There was no visible progress for months, then there was rapid progress. You saw what I call “The Foundation Effect.” The Foundation Effect is the delay in your progress, as you build your foundation. You have false starts and failures, and it looks as if you’re going nowhere. But once you have your foundation built, you progress rapidly. Back to the races Henry Ford, the failed carmaker, won the sprint. But it wasn’t until much later he also won the marathon. Eight years after that race, Henry’s Ford Motor Company released a car that changed everything. It was durable enough to make it over rough country roads, lined with horse-drawn-wagon tracks. It was versatile enough farmers could use the engine to run a wheat thresher or move hay bales down a conveyer belt. It was twice as good as any car out there, at half the price. The first year, they sold 10,000. The second year, 20,000. A few years after that, they sold almost 200,000. By the time the “Model T” went out of production nearly twenty years after introduction, the Ford Motor Company had sold nearly 15 million. More than half of all cars in the world were Fords. Meanwhile, Alexander Winton’s company kept building custom cars, made-to-order. He just couldn’t compete with Ford’s Model T, and had to shut down. Despite having over 100 patents on automobile technology, few today have ever heard of Alexander Winton. You need a foundation How did Henry Ford create such an incredible car, that sold in such incredible quantities? He built a rock-solid foundation. Over and over, he rejected the mere illusion of progress to scrap everything and start over. As a creator, you may feel as if you’re getting nowhere. You’re starting projects, but not finishing them. The ones you do finish are failing. You’re throwing iterations in the fire, like Radclyffe Hall. From recent episodes, you know creative waste is part of the process. You’re building the underwater part of your iceberg, so some future masterpiece will be that much better. But you’re also building your foundation. The foundation of a building holds it in place. Even when the building sways in the wind or shakes in an earthquake, the foundation is there to bare the stress. Architects and engineers can design a foundation using knowledge about the laws of physics. Many buildings have been built before, so there’s a lot of collective experience to draw from. You, as a creator, need to build your foundation from scratch. It’s what makes your work unique. As a creator, your foundation is made of the change you want your work to make, the medium through which you’ll make that change, and the process you’ll follow to make your product. These things take time to develop. It will look as if you’re getting nowhere, but once they’re in place – like a skyscraper once the foundation is laid – your progress will be rapid. How to build your foundation To build your foundation, you need to clarify your vision and master your execution, so you won’t topple over. Here are some ways to do that. 1. Keep shipping This seems counterintuitive, because when a skyscraper goes up, they only build one building. They aren’t putting up a few stories, scrapping it, and starting over. The reason they can build a foundation to support the skyscraper is, millions of other buildings have been built before that skyscraper. Architects and engineers can design a strong foundation because they have tons of data. You need to collect tons of data about your unique way of doing things. How do you get it done? How do people react? Does it express your unique point of view? What is that point of view? Overall, how do you make what only you can make? Henry Ford’s hit car was the Model “T.” Why was it called the Model T? Because he had already built the Model S, the Model R, Q, P, O – you get the idea. He started with Model A. It took until Model T to build the foundation for stratospheric success. The way you build your foundation as a creator is to keep shipping. Remember, shipping is a skill. And each time you ship, you make your foundation stronger. 2. Don’t just build. Experiment. It’s funny that when most people think of Henry Ford, they think of the assembly line. A bunch of guys on a line, each doing one tiny job, such as placing a nut on a bolt, or merely turning the nut on the bolt. But for Ford to create those tasks, he first had to design the product that could be broken down into those tasks. Ford treated each car he designed and built as an experiment. He made them as good as he could, but knew they couldn’t be perfect. They were going to break down, or have annoying maintenance requirements that needed to be improved. We can design buildings that don’t collapse because other buildings have failed. Ford made new and better cars because his cars failed. That’s how he improved the transmission, lubrication, and spark plugs. That’s how he found a steel alloy that would be lightweight and strong – and countless other improvements to the design and manufacture of his cars. And that’s how, even as he improved the Model T, he kept making it cheaper. When he introduced it in 1909, it was $825. Sixteen years later, inflation be dammed, it was only $260. 3. Walk away from failures (guilt-free) Henry Ford wasn’t afraid to quit. Yes, he went from Model A to Model T, but that was in his third car company. He had one failed company before the race, and after he won that race, he gained enough notoriety to attract investors for a second car company. But he walked away from that company, too – only four months later. By the way, Ford went from A to T, and not all those cars were introduced to the public. Many were internal experiments that he walked away from – or, if you will, iterations thrown in the fire, like Radclyffe Hall’s drafts. 4. Have a vision You can’t walk away from failures for no reason. You can’t learn from experiments if you don’t know what you’re looking for. You need a vision. You don’t have a crystal-clear vision from the start. That’s why you’re doing all that shipping and experimenting and quitting in the first place. Why did Henry Ford walk away from the car company he started after the race? It wasn’t going to help him carry out his vision. Ford had a vision to create an affordable automobile for the masses. His investors, on the other hand, wanted to build high-end cars for the wealthy. The company wasn’t a foundation that was going to help Ford achieve his vision, so he stepped back, to build a foundation that would. Keep building your foundation If you’re frustrated with your progress as a creator, maybe it’s because you’re still working on your foundation. If you’re scrapping iterations and walking away from half-finished, and failed, projects, make sure it’s in the pursuit of a vision. If it is, keep learning, until you get it right. Once your foundation is in place, the sky is the limit. Image: Monument by Paul Klee About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/foundation-effect/

Leonardo da Vinci is easily the most-accomplished procrastinator who ever lived. He finished hardly any projects at all. He was great at many things, but he wasn’t great at shipping. The world would have been better off if Leonardo da Vinci had treated shipping as a skill. Far be it for me to criticize anything Leonardo da Vinci did. Despite his repeated failure to ship, he lives on today as one of the greatest geniuses who ever lived – enough so that I’m talking about him in a podcast 500 years after his death. What Leonardo da Vinci procrastinated on He foreshadowed the first law of motion, saying two-hundred years before Newton that, “Every movement tends to maintain itself.” He made a number of discoveries about the circulatory system: He was the first to notice the heart was the center of the blood system – not the liver. He described how an area of the aorta functioned, but since he never published his observations, it’s named after a different scientist, who re-discovered this area two-hundred years later. He correctly described how blood flow affects the opening and closing of heart valves – findings that were proven correct only recently – 450 years later. He wrote or planned to write treatises on topics including painting, anatomy, human flight, geology, and astronomy. Much of what he wrote would have broken new ground in these fields, and set them ahead a couple centuries – if only he had published it. Even his greatest masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, Leonardo never finished. His patron never got their painting, and Leonardo never got paid. It was still in his studio when he died, more than fifteen years after he had begun the painting. Okay, so some of Leonardo’s procrastination was iceberg-building Much of Leonardo’s failure to ship was a part of his creative process. It was the creative waste that made the underwater part of his iceberg – as I talked about in the past couple episodes. There could have been practical reasons he didn’t ship. Remember, once Leonardo delivered one of his paintings, it was gone forever. He couldn’t snap a photo of it for safe-keeping on the cloud. One reason he clung onto mostly-finished paintings was so he could refer to them, borrowing a trick he did painting a smile from one painting, and a trick he did to make it feel like the eyes are following you around the room from another painting. But it’s hard to say Leonardo couldn’t have been better at shipping, when you look at all he could have contributed if only he were. And if you want to be a great creator, it makes sense to ship. Most of us would rather have our genius recognized in our lifetime, rather than marveled at hundreds of years later for what it would have contributed. Shipping is a skill Shipping is a skill. The act of having a vision, planning to achieve that vision, and executing on that vision is a skill you should cultivate, just as you would practice a programming language, writing, or macramé. Treat shipping as a skill, and you’ll finish more projects. Shipped projects have a better chance of having an impact on the world. The sub-skills of shipping Shipping is a sub-skill of creative work. But the act of shipping itself has its own sub-skills. It’s hard to see what you’re missing out on by not treating shipping as a skill, unless you look closely at the sub-skills of shipping. Here are the sub-skills of shipping: Vision: Can you visualize the outcome you’d like to have? Planning: Can you imagine the steps you need to follow to make this vision a reality? Resourcefulness: Can you assess what resources you have that can help you achieve this vision, find what resources you don’t have, and use all those resources wisely? Adaptability: Can you adapt your plan when some part, inevitably, doesn’t go as planned? Overcoming Perfectionism: Your final product won’t be a perfect execution of your vision. Can you overcome perfectionism and ship anyway? Fear of Shipping: Once you ship your project, there will be a void in your mind where that project once lived. Can you “let go” of the project and overcome the fear of that void? Facing Failure: Once you ship your project, you give it a chance to succeed or fail. Can you face potential criticism or failure? Reflection: How well can you reflect on the project, and process what you’ve learned, so you can apply it to the next project? Project-independent shipping skills Many shipping skills are project-independent. You can practice shipping, and many sub-skills of shipping, with any kind of project. Any time you have a vision, execute on that vision, and bring it into the world, you are practicing the skill of shipping. Some examples of small projects on which you can practice the skill of shipping: Cooking a recipe: Can you figure out how to get all the ingredients? Can you execute the plan? Did it turn out how you expected? What can you do differently next time? Planning a party: What kind of vibe do you want this party to have? Should it have a theme? Who should you invite? What do you need to tell them in the invitation to set the tone? What will you do differently for the next party? Planning a trip: Do you want to relax, or have an adventure? What’s your budget? How much time do you have? How long will it take to get there? What do you need to pack? What should you do first and second and last to make it the trip you imagined? How I built my shipping skills When I first started on my own, I had almost no shipping skills. So, I started treating shipping as a skill. Any chance I had to have a vision, try to execute that vision, and ask myself what I could have done differently was a chance to practice the skill of shipping. The simplest way to practice shipping is trying to cook a recipe. I can tell you, it’s quite hard if you’re terrible at shipping. Fortunately I lived two blocks from a grocery store, because I had to make lots of trips back. Planning parties was one of the more fun ways to practice shipping. I experimented with different themes. I learned who to invite first, and who to get involved in the planning, to get people interested in coming. One of the biggest hits was the “Inexplicably Overdressed Bar Crawl.” We’d go to various dive bars wearing suits and evening gowns. It was fun to imagine what would happen if a bunch of overdressed people went to dive bars – and it was fun to see what actually did happen. I eventually worked up to planning my mini-lives, which I talked about on episode 5. If you’re going to try living in the city you dream about a couple months, how do you want it to go? How do you make the most of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? Any project is an opportunity to work on the project-independent shipping skills and sub-skills. Project-specific shipping skills On August 7, 1974, as groggy New Yorkers were on their way to work in the morning, they couldn’t believe what they saw in the sky. It was a man – Philippe Petit – on a tightrope. For nearly an hour, Petit performed on a cable strung between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Petit didn’t just show up and do a performance a quarter-mile in the air. What became known as “the artistic crime of the century” took a lot of planning. Yes, Petit had project-independent shipping skills he was practicing. He had the vision to tightrope walk between the towers when he saw them in a magazine in a dentist’s office in France six years prior. But, performing a tightrope-walk way up in the sky has lots of project-specific shipping skills, too. Besides the obvious challenge of balancing on a wire without falling, Petit had to figure out how to gain access to the twin towers, what materials to use to handle the wind and the weight of his body, and how to build buzz about his performance so more people would see it. So, leading up to his performance at the World Trade Center, Petit did performances on other landmarks around the world. He did a tightrope walk on the Notre Dame cathedral, in Paris, and between pylons of the Sydney Harbor Bridge, in Australia. Practice the shipping skills for your project type If you have a big vision you want to execute, take on smaller projects that will help you practice not only general shipping skills, but also skills specific to shipping that kind of project. This is why Seth Godin told me on that if I wanted to publish a successful book, I had better start cranking out “a book a week” on Kindle. I didn’t publish a book a week, but I did publish – and continue to publish – “short reads.” They’re great shipping practice specific to book-publishing projects. This is why I encourage people who want to self publish to upload to KDP a really short Kindle book – even if they do it under a pen name. It teaches you lots of shipping skills specific to self-publishing books. How do you format the book? How do you get a cover design? What keywords do you want to put in the back-end? What categories will your book be in? These are all questions you have to answer whether you’re publishing a book that’s five pages long, or five-hundred pages long. Practice shipping, and shipping will be easier Publishing a book that’s five-hundred pages long will always require some skills you don’t get to practice when publishing a book that’s five pages long. Tightrope walking a quarter mile in the air will always require skills you don’t practice when tightrope walking a hundred feet in the air. But the more skills you master before your grand performance, the easier it is to handle the new skills you’re testing for your current project. Practice shipping, and shipping will get easier. Shipping is a skill. Image: Revolving House by Paul Klee About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/shipping-is-a-skill/

When Vincent van Gogh began his career as an artist, he had already failed at everything else. He even got fired from his own family’s business in the process. Not seeing any alternative, he completely immersed himself in art. In one two-week period, he created 120 drawings. But exactly none of those drawings are famous today. What feels like waste is not waste Last week, I talked about the Iceberg Principle – the idea that any masterpiece you see is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s far more knowledge and experience beneath the surface, giving that masterpiece confidence and grace. But as you’re adding layer after layer to your iceberg, it doesn’t feel like that’s what you’re doing. It feels like you’re wasting your energy. But you’re not. After Van Gogh’s frenzied first couple weeks seriously pursuing art, he settled in to a more conservative pace. Instead of 120 drawings in two weeks, he was instead shooting to make just twenty a week. He figured that’s how many he’d have to make to end up with one good piece each week. “Waste” takes many forms What feels like “waste” can take many forms: Failed projects: You made something, and nobody likes it. Off on timing: Nobody like it yet, but some day someone will. Unfinished projects: You started, got a little ways, and maybe Shiny Object Syndrome took over. For whatever reason, you didn’t finish. Research and Preparation: You don’t always know what you’re trying to learn, but all sorts of tinkering may seem like a waste. Creative waste is part of the creative game Sometimes what feels like “waste,” makes it directly into a current or future project, thus making it clearly not waste. But even the stuff that never becomes a part of your body of work is part of the creative game. I talked in episode 256 about the Barbell Strategy. To succeed in creative work, put most of your efforts toward “sure bets” that protect your downside and keep you in the game. With the rest of your time and energy, play “wildcards,” that have a chance of big upside. Creative work happens in Extremistan, not Mediocristan. Success won’t be a steady climb up-and-to-the-right. Instead, it will look more like a poorly-shaved porcupine. Long periods of time where it doesn’t seem like much is happening, punctuated by big spikes that level up your career one at a time. Yes, you’re showing up every day and putting in the work, but all that is a series of small bets. You hope for one or two or a few to turn into positive Black Swans. Projects that take off, and take on a life of their own. In the course of playing this strategy, you can’t tell what will be wasted, and what will not. You have to trust that “waste” is part of the process. Projects will fail, projects will go unfinished, and iterations will burn in the fire. That doesn’t make you a procrastinator or a dilettante – that makes you a creator. Waste in Van Gogh’s first masterpiece Vincent van Gogh’s first masterpiece was full of waste. He did not just a sketch, but a small study, a medium study, and a print he could give out to test his idea. This was all before working on the final canvas. And that had many iterations, and four coats of varnish. He left it in his friend’s studio to prevent himself from “spoiling it.” Then he still came back and worked on it some more. All that waste was on top of the years of work he did leading up to the project. The painting was about peasants, and he wandered around living like a peasant himself, begging people to model for him. And, there was the twenty drawings a week he had done. And those 120 drawings he did in a two-week period? We don’t even know what they look like, because he destroyed them. Once this first masterpiece, The Potato Eaters, was done, it must have felt like a waste to Vincent. Everyone hated it. He got in a fight with his brother about it, and he completely cut off a friend who attacked it, viciously. Vincent van Gogh’s first masterpiece was the result of a lot of waste. Each of those drawings was a failed project, surely many were left unfinished. He did a massive amount of research and preparation, and he was certainly off on timing. The Potato Eaters is regarded as a masterpiece today. Creative waste adds to the iceberg You already heard last week about how any masterpiece is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s far more below the surface. So what new do you learn from creative waste? Sometimes, you can’t see the tip of the iceberg. Sometimes it all just feels like waste. Your projects are failing, and your preparation and planning isn’t getting you anywhere, causing you to leave projects unfinished. Just remember that other creators have embraced creative waste. I told you last week about how Margaret Mitchell re-wrote nearly every chapter of Gone With the Wind at least twenty times, Jerry Seinfeld says joke-writing is “ninety-five percent re-write,” Meredith Monk’s charts and graphs go to waste and don’t end up in the final performance, and Stephen King reminds you to “kill your darlings.” Those are all fine when you’re deep in a project and you can see where it’s going, but what do you do when entire projects get scrapped? Great creators embrace waste That’s when you need to remind yourself of the approach Picasso took to his paintings. He did one after another. He saw them as like “pages in [his] journal.” He understood that not all his works would be successful. Even once he had a finished piece, he didn’t know its true fate. “The future will chose the pages it prefers,” he said. “It’s not up to me to make the choice.” Embrace creative waste. No waste, no wins. Image: Tale of Hoffmann by Paul Klee About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/creative-waste/

1920s, London. Radclyffe Hall was pacing around her study. She wore close-cropped hair, a tweed skirt, and a man’s silk smoking jacket and tie. Her partner, Uma Troubridge, sat in a nearby chair, reading the writing of Radclyffe – or “John,” as she preferred to be called. But just as Uma’s voice wavered a bit, John grabbed the papers from her hand, and threw them in the fire. In the 1920s, throwing writing in the fire meant it was gone forever. These weren’t print-outs of digital files, safely backed up to the cloud. But Radclyffe still often threw her writing into the fire, if she didn’t like the sound of what Uma was reading. Radclyffe Hall, like many great creators, understood the Iceberg Principle Any masterpiece is just the tip of the iceberg What I call the Iceberg Principle is this: What you see of any masterpiece is just the tip of the iceberg. There is far more knowledge and work beneath the surface, giving the piece confidence and grace. The Iceberg Principle is inspired by Ernest Hemingway, who said, “The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” He explained further: I’ve seen the marlin mate and know about that. So I leave that out. I’ve seen a school (or pod) of more than fifty sperm whales in that same stretch of water once and harpooned one nearly sixty feet in length and lost him. So I left that out. All the stories I know from the fishing village I leave out. But the knowledge is what makes the underwater part of the iceberg. In other words, when Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea, he didn’t need to include every story and every detail about the life of a fisherman. He had already lived it. His experiences fishing were the underwater part of the iceberg. The stories and details he did include were only the tip of the iceberg. They were more powerful because they were held in place by everything beneath the surface. What isn’t revealed gives power to what is revealed If I say, “I’m David. I grew up in Nebraska. I now live in Colombia,” I’ve only said three statements, but each of those statements is held in place by a massive amount of knowledge and experience. When I say, “I grew up in Nebraska,” eighteen years of open skies and snow drifts and cornfields flash in my mind. When I say, “I’m David,” more than forty years of being called David are behind that. I’ve never had a different name. When you read a book by Daniel Kahneman, and he tells you something about human behavior, there’s a lot of authority behind everything he says. Each statement he makes is backed up by mountains of data, and decades of running experiments and seeing it with his own eyes. While he maintains the humble uncertainty of a real scientist, there’s confidence and grace behind each statement. Just think of how much work, experience, and knowledge went behind Einstein writing the simple equation: e = mc². This is something Radclyffe Hall seemed to understand. It didn’t matter if she threw her writing into the fire and started over. When she heard Uma’s voice waver, that signaled to her that her stories or her characters weren’t flowing on the page confidently. The same way snow and ice layers onto an iceberg, making it bigger over time, pushing more of it underwater over time, it took many iterations for Hall to write classics such as The Well of Loneliness – the first great novel of lesbian literature. Each time she threw writing into the fire, the paper burned, but the iceberg didn’t melt – it only gained mass. Keep the Iceberg Principle in mind Why should you keep the Iceberg Principle in mind? The Iceberg Principle helps you manage expectations about your work. It also takes some of the mystery out of great masterpieces you see. The product is not the process That last part, first: When we see a masterpiece, we can’t help but marvel at how it must have been made. What we see is deceiving, because we tend to mistake the product for the process. This is because the way we consume the product is very different from the process through which that product is produced. When we read a novel, we read one word after another. When we see a painting, it hits our eyes all at once. When we watch a movie, the images flash on the screen in order. But that’s not how any of it is made. The novel wasn’t written one word after another. The painting wasn’t laid down in orderly brushstrokes. The events in the movie weren’t shot, much less conceived, one after another. And no, Michelangelo did not “simply remove everything that wasn’t David.” As I talked about in Mind Management, Not Time Management, an enormous amount of “Preparation” went into carving the David. So when you see a great masterpiece, and marvel at how it must have been created, know that the product is not the process. What you see is only the tip of the iceberg. Manage your expectations It might feel intimidating to know that what you see of any masterpiece is only a small amount of the work and experience it took to create it. But it can be empowering, too. Don’t get frustrated when you sit down to write and it doesn’t make sense. Don’t lose hope when you strum a guitar and the strings rattle on the frets. Things don’t come out perfectly the first time around. I’ve talked a little on this podcast and in The Heart to Start about the Fortress Fallacy: that we tend to have visions that outpace our current abilities. One reason we fall for the Fortress Fallacy is that when we envision building a fortress, we only think of the act of building the actual fortress. We don’t think about the other seven-eighths of the work that goes into the knowledge and planning and materials sourcing of building the fortress. The iceberg takes many forms The underwater part of the iceberg can take many forms. For Hemingway, it was his life experiences, fishing. For Hall, it was the many failed iterations of her writing. The underwater part of the iceberg can be other projects you’ve done, other projects you never finished, or even time your ideas have spent incubating, between projects. Any of these can be the underwater part of the iceberg. They hold up the visible parts with confidence and grace. Great creators follow the Iceberg Principle We rarely get to see the underwater part of icebergs in creators’ work. But if you look hard, you can find it. There are few art forms where the process is more unlike the product than movies. If you had asked me when I was a kid how movies were made, I would have guessed actors and camera operators just made something up. That’s how the movies I made on our home video camera were done, after all. But in fact an incredible amount of work goes into making a movie well before camera operators are hired and actors are cast. I know now that a writer writes a screenplay first. Thanks to screenwriting instructor Robert McKee’s book, Story, we can see the underwater part of the iceberg. McKee warns screenwriters that if every idea they come up with makes it into their final screenplay, they’ve got a problem. “If you’ve never thrown an idea away,” he says, “your work will almost certainly fail.” The Iceberg Principle is why Stephen King tells writers, “Kill your darlings.” (Don’t dare try to keep your whole iceberg above water. Even your favorite parts.) It’s why when Meredith Monk is composing an interdisciplinary performance, she draws charts and graphs about how the various elements – music and dance and space on the stage – will interact with one another. None of those sketches make it to the final performance, but that work is there to add grace to the piece. It’s why Jerry Seinfeld has described the joke-writing process as an experiment that gathers data. In other words, you don’t just get up on stage and tell a great joke. You have to go from writing desk to stage and back again many times. He said of his joke-writing process, “It’s ninety-five percent re-write.” It’s why, when Margaret Mitchell was writing Gone With the Wind, she re-wrote nearly every chapter at least twenty times. Start building your iceberg When we see masterpieces we admire, and try to replicate that work, we’re bound to fail. What we create is so far from our vision, it seems pointless to even try. But thanks to the Iceberg Principle, you now know that what you see of any masterpiece is just the tip of the iceberg. To build your masterpiece, start building your iceberg. The more you add to the underwater part of your iceberg, the more solid and beautiful your masterpiece will be. Image: Crystal Gradation by Paul Klee Thank you for having me on your podcasts! Thank you for having me on your podcast! Thank you to Kjell Vandevyvere of Coffee and Pens. As always, you can find all podcast interviews of me at kadavy.net/interviews. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/iceberg-principle/

It’s 1997, and Tiger Woods is in a sudden death playoff, against Tom Lehman. Lehman shoots first, on a par three, and hits his ball into the water. Now Tiger’s up, and this is Tiger’s tournament to lose. All he has to do is hit a safe shot, far away from the hole, and far away from the water. But that’s not what he does. An aggressive and dangerous play The hole is way on the left side of the green, near the water. There’s water short, and there’s water left – where Tom Lehman’s shot went. The smart play is just hit the ball onto the green, way right of the hole, so there’s no chance it goes in the water. Then Tiger can putt twice, for par, and win the tournament. Tiger hits his shot, watches with anticipation as it flies through the air – and almost goes directly into the hole. It’s eight inches away. He just won the tournament. The crowd goes wild, meanwhile, the announcers are trying to figure out why Tiger would make a play like that. Why shoot directly at the hole, when there’s water all around? If he had made the slightest error, Tiger would have tied Lehman, and extended the playoff to the next hole. The announcers say, Well he’s 21 years old. He’s aggressive. Some of you are no doubt thinking, Why would he make a play like that? Because he’s Tiger Woods, that’s why. Perfection comes from imperfection I recently showed my partner a career highlights video of Tiger Woods. She had never heard of him, and had never seen golf (remember, she’s Colombian). By the end of the video, she was convinced Tiger Woods was a witch, who could magically conjure a ball into a hole from 200 yards away. Because that’s what she saw. Over and over, this guy swinging, then a tiny ball flying through the air for several seconds, and jumping and spinning and rolling into a tiny hole. When we see an expert in any field, we marvel at what they’re able to accomplish. When we compare our own skills, we can’t help but feel insignificant. But sometimes, what seems like perfection is someone not striving for perfection, but instead working cleverly with their imperfections. Several years after this playoff, where Tiger Woods made this bold play. He re-lived it in his book. He explained that he was very much aware all he had to do was hit the green – to play safely away from the water. In fact, that’s exactly what he did. When you’re missing right, aim left Yes, Tiger’s ball almost went in the hole, but that’s not where he was aiming. Besides knowing the smart strategy in this playoff situation, Tiger had noticed something during his warm-up before the playoff: His shots tended to go left. Like Tom Lehman, Tiger had pulled his ball to the left, but because Tiger was aiming to the right, he almost had a hole-in-one. This is hard to process for many who don’t play golf – indeed many who do play golf. How can the greatest golfer who ever lived be missing to the left? And why would the greatest golfer who ever lived aim away from the hole? When we see greatness, this is often what’s happening. Tiger was missing to the left, so he aimed right. I call it “aim left,” because it’s just less confusing than “aim right.” Aiming left is simply accepting you’re not perfect, and shooting your shot according to your tendencies. You can use this in your creative work, in your habits, and yes – in golf. When you’re missing to the right, aim left. Michelangelo aimed left When Michelangelo was hired to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling, he faced an impossible task. As if it weren’t hard enough to paint 12,000 square feet of ceiling, Michelangelo wasn’t a painter! He was a sculptor. He had hardly painted anything to that point. Add to that, this was fresco – which is incredibly unforgiving. You get a patch of wet plaster to paint on each day, and once it’s dry, it’s literally set in stone. So what did Michelangelo do? As Ross King – who I talked to on episode 99 explained, Michelangelo aimed left. He started with an inconspicuous part of the ceiling – one of the last places someone would look when entering the chapel – and one of the last places the pope would look while sitting on his throne. By starting with an inconspicuous part of the ceiling, Michelangelo was free to let his fresco-painting skills develop throughout the project. By the end of the project, he wasn’t even transferring drawings to the ceiling, and was instead painting directly onto the plaster. Other greats aimed left Accomplished creators are always aiming left. They’re always compensating for the weaknesses they know they have. Ernest Hemingway knew starting a writing session was always the hardest part. So, he aimed left. He made sure to end writing sessions knowing what he was going to write next. That way when he returned to his writing the next day, he’d have no trouble writing his first few words. Kingsley Amis did this, and Todd Henry, who I talked to on episode 109 has said he stops in the middle of a sentence. Edna Ferber built her dream house, complete with a writing study that had a beautiful view. After all that trouble, she decided that view was too distracting. So, she aimed left. She pushed her desk against the only blank wall in her study, so the view couldn’t distract her. Somerset Maugham also faced a blank wall, and I did it a while myself. Benjamin Franklin wanted to improve his character, but couldn’t focus on everything he wanted to work on at once. So, he aimed left. He kept a schedule of his “thirteen virtues.” Each week, he tried to improve at only one of those virtues – things like cleanliness, frugality, and humility. By focusing on only one virtue at a time – and forgetting the rest – Franklin improved his character in all thirteen virtues. Ways of aiming left To aim left, take anything where you consistently miss, and compensate for that miss. In The Heart to Start, I talked about “The Fortress Fallacy.” We tend to have visions that outsize our current skill level. Over and over, we start ambitious projects, but fail to follow through once we realize how daunting they are. To aim left, go ahead and dream of the fortress, but first, build a cottage – a smaller project that builds the same skills you’ll use in the larger project. I also talked about “Motivational Judo,” which is a form of aiming left. If you struggle to get motivated, create conditions that use your own action-avoidance tactics against themselves. Pavlok founder Maneesh Sethi built a wristband to shock himself. Sociologist Harriet Martineau knew she only needed to suffer through the first fifteen minutes of writing, and she’d have the momentum to keep going. This is similar to the Ten-Minute Hack I also talked about in The Heart to Start. In the previous episode, I talked about a way to cure Shiny Object Syndrome by aiming left. If you know you jump from unfinished project to unfinished project, treat shipping as a skill. Turn everyday things like meals and day-trips into “projects.” Make plans and execute – ship the projects. Many opportunities to aim left Look around, and you’ll find many opportunities to aim left. Anywhere you aren’t achieving what you want, you can find a way to direct your imperfection toward perfection. Or, at least, near-perfection – eight inches away, to be exact. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/aim-left/