Don’t Post That Right Away

Allow me to combine two thoughts from Seth Godin and Steven Pressfield.

Shipping and the Muse.

Shipping something early betrays what it is. It is a gift to work on, not to impulsively act on.

Never shipping is bad of course, becoming the terrible perfectionist this course of innaction produces. But shipping on first thought, first descent from the Muse, betrays what the Muse gave you in the first place.

You were given something to work with and refine.

So the conditioning we’ve been under by social media to share something now, fast, as soon as lightning strikes, is a highly unnatural thing to do. At best it mangles and deforms the great idea the Muse provided.

But capturing it,

jotting it down,

making a note of it,

storing it for later when you sit at the workshop desk,

taking a walk pondering it,

creating the first line of the song,

sharing the breakthrough idea with a friend and getting feedback….this is the work of the artist.

And we are all artists.

We simply shouldn’t ship by hitting send or post the moment we come up with that completely unique talking point we just heard from someone saying it to thousands of other people hearing the exact same talking point (that’s a sarcastic jab if you can tell).

We need to get back into the craft work of letting inspiration steep inside of us and get worked on internally.

We need to get back into the virtue of delayed gratification. Or no gratification at all.

But we must refine what it is we will eventually (sooner than a perfectionist) ship to the world once the Muse provides us with that which stops us in our tracks.