Dear Friend, Subscriber, and fellow Category Pirate,
Weβre lost at seaβjust wanted to let you know how we got here (and why being lost at sea isnβt always a bad thing).
"Is this legendary?" is one of our favorite questions.Β
We've been working on our next "mini-bookβ for the last 15 days.
We thought we really had something.
Then, it became clear. What we had was a hot mess.Β
Over 50 hours of combined work.
Absolutely breakthrough thinking.
Countless sentences and paragraphs we thought were great.
Expensive primary research.
We decided to ditch all of it.
Throwing out carefully crafted work that youβre passionate about, that you thought would spark a breakthrough for other people, and would make a meaningful difference is very painful. And the emotions you have around βsunk costsβ can play tricks on your mind:
βHow can we walk away from this? Weβve invested so much!"
Most of all, not delivering on time for your customers (in our case, our beloved Pirate readers) hurts.
What if customers get mad? Stop buying? Cancel their subscriptions?
But thatβs what we chose to do.
2 weeks of work.
Countless hours of rewrites.
Until we finally paused, drank a bit of our own bourbon (weβve never liked the clichΓ© βeat our own dog foodβ), and asked ourselves:
Is this legendary?
It was not.
So, we threw all our work in the trash and started over.
Does that mean all our time and effort was wasted? Absolutely not.
Because starting over made us discover an even bigger, even more meaningful, more legendary ideaβhiding in plain sight.
And thatβs what weβre working on now.
Hang tight, Pirates.
We think weβve found buried treasureβand we canβt wait to share it with you.
Arrrrrrr,
Category Pirates
This is more exciting to me than a normal article.
I trashed my current book earlier this month, retitled it and enrolled in Pirate Coles writing cohort just to give my project a fighting chance at being legendary.
I can't wait to learn from you all after this moment, because it's exactly what I'm facing.
Anticipation at an all time high. Solid update - weβre all tuned in. Anyone who jumps ship doesnβt deserve the next mini book π΄ββ οΈ