Why I Publish Bad Blog Posts

Yes, I’ve written bad blog posts and published them. 

For any of you who follow me or read my blog, this shouldn’t be a surprise.They can’t all be “War and Peace.”

The thing that’s difficult isn’t writing good content and publishing it—it’s publishing work that’s not that amazing.

It hurts me sometimes if what I write doesn’t feel massively inspiring, insightful, unique, or actionable.

The goal is to get to a place of consistent, high-quality output.

That can’t happen without publishing the bad stuff along the way.This is not a cheap, disguised excuse to pump out crummy content—that would be deliberately cutting corners to reduce the effort required.That would be consistently low quality.Seneca said something like: “in order to know and understand good wine, one must drink a lot of bad, even terrible wine.”I think you get the point.If you want to be great, you have to forgive yourself for not being great right at this very second and understand that you’re going to have to be embarrassed for a little while as you figure it all out.

2 Minute Action

Publish something today.Perform the speech that’s not quite ready yet.Implement a new lesson plan that’s almost all the way there.Unless you’re a brain surgeon, the risk of failing isn’t that high.Go for the gusto, today.

The 2 Underlying (And Overlooked) Components of Motivation

Your motivation changes with 2 critical things.When something is scarce or rare, we tend to want it more.When something is urgent, we tend to take action more.Combined, these are a marketing force to be reckoned with.

This information can either be interesting or it can also be useful.

You can use this understanding to avoid feeling pressured into buy those widgets when there are only 6 left and the sale ends tonight.You can use this understanding to prepare for the inevitable internal battle with eating junk food or exercising.Now that you know this information, what will you do?

2 Minute Action

If you’ve been trying to do something for a long time and have been failing, ask yourself: what will be different about it, this time?You should be able to come up with an answer in 2 minutes.Even just one new idea will set up your path and help give you the motivation to follow through.