The secret to great work
My last email was about an incredible meal on a recent trip to New York.
But I wasn't just there for the food.
(Though I did nom-nom my way through enough restaurants to have to buy a new pair of stretchy-pants before returning home).
I was in NYC for copywriter & author Laura Belgray's “Shrimp Club” Mastermind Retreat, where I presented a talk about how solopreneurs can get out of their own way to have a thriving business (*see Laura's rave review below! Squee!).
One of the nuggets of wisdom I learned from Laura during the retreat?
The power of being prolific.
That is, the more you create, the better (and faster) you create.
Like a woman after my own heart, she used a food analogy:
“Quality over quantity is true when it comes to sushi, but not creativity.”
To create vibrant ideas, “The most important possible thing you could do,” as Ira Glass from This American Life says, “is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.”
While Thomas Edison pioneered the lightbulb, the phonograph, and the carbon telephone, he also filed over a thousand patents for inventions that we never talk about.
We celebrate only a fraction of the 50,000 works of art Picasso created.
Mozart composed over 600 pieces before his death at 35. Bach wrote over a thousand in his lifetime.
Creators (and yes, my friend, you are a creator if you own a business) don't know which of their output will land.
The best way to create a hit is to get in the flow of creating abundantly, so that:
Some of it is more likely to resonate deeply,
Your skills improve as you do more of the work, and
You overcome the perfectionism-impulse that can keep you stuck.
So, whether you're working on a blog article, crafting a social media post, or designing a program for clients, it's much better to get in the flow of writing a lot of ideas, rather than creating only a few and then obsessing about refining those few.
How can you set up a habit of creating regularly?
Can you start with “writing-time” every day? Or come up with 25 ideas for every one problem you need to solve? Or get in a habit of posting frequently, even if you don't feel like you have a lot to say?
If you can't think of how to do this… take out a piece of paper, grab a pen, and jot as many ideas as you can think of in 10 minutes. There's power in being prolific.
