I am obsessed with the creative process, particularly with early work. One of the earliest projects I did was a self-funded one with friends to talk to recording artists about their early work. And even more recently, I wrote a book about the topic. 

I’ll explain why all of that in another post, but really the jist of this one is to encourage you to start and finish something today:

Early work is messy. 

It’s ordinary. Not even close to good.

And the people making it aren’t always consistent. They miss days.

One of the worst things we can do for ourselves as creators and artists is to compare our early work to people in the mature stages of their work. So instead, let’s look at two great examples of early work:

From 2002 — Author Seth Godin, who has written probably over 10,000 blog posts as of 2022, writing, “Sorry I haven’t blogged in a while. I’ve been traveling.”

From 2007 — Entrepreneur and author Gary Vaynerchuk, who encourages others to post 100x per day and wants to publish 4,000 pieces of content per day, introducing himself, “Hello everybody, this is Gary Vaynerchuk and this is my one twenty. Haven’t done these in a little while I’m gonna get real on track…” (Team Garyvee enables him to do this)

Even inconsistent posting is better than none at all. 

As you’re starting out, the best thing to do something that day. 

Try to get consistent, but don’t be too hard on yourself if you aren’t. Post anywhere that encourages you to write more. (I’m choosing to do it here at the blog.)

And a practice that starts off inconsistent might become consistent, and 2 decades later, you might be the one with 7,000 blog posts or a team navigating through your library and publishing 100 pieces of content per day.