A Lesson from Seth Godin’s First Blog Post

↓

I’m a guilty writer.

It’s not that I feel guilty for writing. It’s that I suffer from crippling guilt if I don’t write.

Almost as soon as I start any writing project, I declare a schedule. Writing daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly, I’ve tried them all.

Then life happens.

I’m not a robot in a vacuum, so I inevitably miss a week. That’s when the guilt starts to creep in like a growing shadow.

The voice in my head goes something like this:

“Oh my god. I’ve missed a post. People are going to be mad at me. All the online gurus say consistency is most important, so I bet I’ve lost my audience. Now they’ll show up at my house to point and laugh at me!”

Only, we both know that’s ridiculous, don’t we?

But it’s almost like clockwork. And then I read some smug responses to the consistency problem and growing an audience like “how about actually showing up when you say you will?” Yes, very helpful.

But recently, I’ve come to my senses.

Legendary blogger Seth Godin is the king of daily blogging. He’s done it for over twenty years, is coming up on 10,000 posts, and is always telling other people to blog.

I wanted to read his first post - Boring (that’s the name, I’m not judging). It was fine, but nothing like his posts of today. None of his early posts are.

Then, I went into his archive and saw that in January 2002 he wrote nine posts.

My eyebrows creased together, “but it’s a daily blog?” I thought to myself. His nine posts were also published over four days, and then he disappeared for four weeks. He comes back, writes a few more posts, and vanishes again.

If that were me, I think I would have been too paralysed by guilt to come back after four weeks to write again.

Can you imagine if, after that short burst in January, Seth Godin read the advice that if you don’t write every day, there’s no point in even showing up and stopping?

Now, he’s published millions of words and has one of the most popular blogs on the internet.

So, I’m breaking the cycle of madness. My latest writing project, a Walk and a Fried Egg. I want to show up and post weekly so I can begin to refine my thoughts towards writing a non-fiction book. And last week, I missed a Monday.

I had a post drafted that needed work, and when I sat down to do it on Monday night. It didn't happen.

You know those times right? You sit down to write, and suddenly, your eyelids have 10 kg weights attached to them. Meanwhile, someone has put your brain in a blender, and you seem to have forgotten what the strange array of letters in front of you is for. It was one of those days. I forced out about 100 words of pure bull doo-doo and called it a day.

Past me would have done one of two things:

• Tortured myself into finishing it anyway
• Felt too guilty to come back today and stopped the whole project

But the new me has been inspired by Seth (yet again), and I came back on Tuesday. My eyelids were unburdened, my brain unblended, and I even remembered what my keyboard was for.

If you commit to a project for the long term, nobody will care that you missed a few weeks. They won’t look at your archived posts, see that you missed a day, and declare you morally bankrupt.

If you stop writing, that’s fine. Come back and start again.

P.S. is this a bit rich coming from someone who hasn’t written this newsletter in 2 months? Maybe. But no one will notice if I keep coming back regularly from here.

Much love from my screen to yours,

​