When Will You Sacrifice Good for Great?
At some point, you’ll have to drop 10%-jumps for 1%-gains
“It took a long time to blog like me.” I’ll never forget that sentence.
By the time Seth Godin dropped it in a 2016 interview, the man had written over 6,000 blog posts, publishing daily for nearly 20 years. Every time I hear him speak, I question why I do what I do.
I love writing. I want to be great at it. But I also want to ensure I can keep doing it, even if that means not doing it some of the time. And so I hedge. I diversify. I put my hands in more and more honey pots until one of them is stuck. Stuck in an average project, stuck in a new income stream, stuck trying to squeeze out another 10% gain. Of course, I’d need that hand to master the next 1% of writing. But it’s stuck so I can’t — until I let go.
When will you sacrifice good for great? That is the question.
It’s easy to think you’re committed. Easy to think you’re doing everything you can. But are you really? Seth thinks, most of the time, we don’t. We just tell ourselves a story.
Most of the people who are watching this — and you, and I — in many of the things that we endeavor to do — we’re just not that good at it. It’s a mistake to fool yourself into thinking you’re as good at songwriting…
