The Renegade Writer Blog

Many of the questions the students of my 8-week e-course ask me stem from the fear of not getting everything just right. “What if I say this and the editor gets offended?” “What if I miss a typo?” “What if I read a year’s worth of back issues and it turns out the magazine ran my idea 13 months ago?” In some cases, this fear keeps aspiring freelancers from taking any action at all.

My philosophy has always been to just take action. In The Renegade Writer, Diana and I write that we’ve both sold articles from queries that contained typos in the very first sentence. I know that if I waited until I was absolutely, 100 percent certain that my queries were perfect, I’d never send any out. And then where would I be?

If the fear of not being perfect is keeping you from getting your work out there, here are two resources that will help motivate you to embrace your mistakes. One is a podcast on Kick-Starting Your Business from Steve Pavlina’s excellent site Personal Development for Smart People. In this podcast, Pavlina urges you to just try things and see if they work. If they do, great. If not, try something else. But at least you’re taking action, which will get better results than sitting there fretting about doing it “right.” This is what Pavlina calls the “ready-fire-aim” approach.

The second is an excerpt from Seth Godin’s free e-book The Bootstrapper’s Bible (reprinted with his permission), which you can find here.

Go ahead — start screwing up! [lf]

ONE GOOD REASON NOT TO PLAN SO MUCH
from The Bootstrapper’s Bible by Seth Godin

Remember when I said I like to ask people how many gas stations they think there are in the United States? Well, the worst answer (and the main reason I ask) is, “I don’t know.” My response is, “I know you don’t know. I want you to make a smart guess.” Nine times out of ten, people refuse, in one way or another, to guess. They don’t want to be wrong. Most people hate to be wrong. They hate to make a statement (or, even worse, to write something down) and then be proved wrong. They don’t like to buy the wrong car, vote for the wrong candidate, wear the wrong shoes.

Starting a business is the most public, most expensive, riskiest way of all to be wrong. Faced with all the sensitivity analysis and business model mumbo-jumbo I talk about in this section, you might find it easy just to give up. “I’m never gonna be as smart as Bill Gates, so I give up!” Yeah, well, Bill Gates isn’t so smart. Bill Gates thought the Internet was a fad. Bill Gates launched three database systems, all of which failed. There’s never been an entrepreneur with a crystal ball. There’s no way to know for sure whether your business is going to work, whether your targeted customers will buy, whether your choice of technology is a good one. You’re going to be wrong. Get used to it!

In the face of this uncertainty, it seems to me that the very worst thing you can do is fail to try. I went to business school at Stanford, which prides itself on being very entrepreneurial. Of the 300 people in my class, at least half publicly proclaimed that they were going to start their own businesses sooner or later. Now, twenty years later, only about 30 of us have actually done it. The rest are still waiting for the right time or the right idea or the right backing. They’re waiting for an engraved invitation and some guarantee of success.

Silicon Valley has been a tremendous boon for this country. One reason is that it has created a culture where being wrong is okay. Being wrong can even make you rich in the Valley! But in most other places, in most other families, the idea of betting your livelihood on something that might not work is a little scary.

Here’s my best advice to you: Stop planning and start doing.

You don’t have to quit your day job. But you do have to get out there and do it. The more you do, the more you do. Doors will open. Opportunities will appear. Your model will change, your reputation will increase, you will become a magnet for smart people, good customers, and investors. But none of this will happen if you stay inside and keep planning. Build your business. One day at a time, one customer at a time. Lower your downsides, focus on the upsides, and start building. But start.

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