There\u2019s nothing more useless than unfinished projects. But it\u2019s easy to watch them stack up, isn\u2019t it? So what can we do to wrap them up and ship them out?<\/p>\n\n
I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about unfinished projects since watching this video<\/a> by my friend, Jeff Walker. Don Miller has also talked<\/a> recently about completing things. It\u2019s tougher than it looks, right?<\/p>\n I can tell you where my difficulty comes from.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been in the publishing industry practically my whole professional life. And if there\u2019s one thing that defines the business, it\u2019s the slow, methodical process of taking an idea to market.<\/p>\n Not only does an author\u2019s writing process consume a lot of time, but the editorial, design, and production processes also slog along.<\/p>\n The reason makes more sense than frustrated authors and readers might think at first.<\/p>\n The truth is it takes considerable coordination to get it all right. Everyone\u2019s in the kitchen: editors, proofers, designers, printers, marketers, publicists, and salespeople.<\/p>\n Once you print something, it\u2019s as good as in stone. Any error or mistake could live for more than a century. And until recently the practice was to print a massive quantity of a new title. So our biggest fear was producing a book that was both wrong and plentiful.<\/p>\n All that to say, I was trained in an industry that was slow on purpose.<\/p>\n But that doesn\u2019t work for me now\u2014any more than it works well for traditional publishers in the new digital world. When you sit on something until it\u2019s \u201cperfect,\u201d you miss a lot of opportunities.<\/p>\n\t\tThe Perfection Trap<\/h3>\n