If All Else Fails, Just Ship It

Ship, learn, iterate, ship.

Illustration by Visualize Value

I’m currently writing this at 8:40 pm on Thursday, the day that I’m supposed to be publishing an issue of my newsletter. I did not want to be in this position but I find myself in it anyway.

My writing process with this newsletter for the last few weeks has been about the same: reflect on what I’ve learned over the past few weeks, jot down a couple of headers in a Notion document, and then do absolutely nothing else until Thursday comes around, the day I need to send it out.

This is not ideal. It’s also not how I want to do things in the foreseeable future. I envision a more streamlined process about getting into a habit of writing every day, refining, editing, in order to make sure that the issue that goes out on Thursday is not a result of me just hunkering down and writing it in a few hours but a more refined product.

However, even though I could work on the process, this is still better than doing nothing. For almost 2 years, I was telling myself to start an online presence, publish my thoughts, put something of value out into the Internet. For those two years though, I have absolutely nothing to show for myself.

Over the last 4 weeks, however, I now have 4 editions of this newsletter to show for, which to me is nothing short of a miracle. Even shipping something that is not the best and refined by-product of your thoughts is better than a completely empty canvas.

Shipping - a term popularized by Steve Jobs and Seth Godin - is the act of delivering, publishing, or releasing your work out into the world. It’s also the barrier for many people that’s stopping them from taking action.

Many people have struggles with their perfectionism stopping them from hitting publish and sharing their work. This blocks them from getting started - the biggest impediment to creative work. This is what caused me to postpone starting a version of this newsletter 2 years ago.

While the issues I’ve published earlier haven’t been the most perfect version of my thoughts - it’s still better than having nothing to show for on my Substack page for the last 4 weeks. I’ve now adopted the ethos of “just shipping” with hitting publish on a newsletter being a non-negotiable thing for me every Thursday.

It’s still early days for me as a writer and shipping things, even if they’re not my best work, still gives me the chance to learn from my mistakes, iterate, and then ship again with these in mind.