Production before perfection — Kelford Labs Daily

“In order to succeed at something, you have to get it done.”

— Greg McKeown, Effortless

I’ve written millions of words of marketing over the years, and the advice I most often give to entrepreneurs struggling to create marketing content—like newsletters, LinkedIn posts, or their homepage copy—is to just finish the dang thing.

You’ve got to see the end before you can decide if it’s any good.

Instead, what often happens is we get frustrated, annoyed, or even flat-out disgusted with what we’ve written so far, and we stop. Then we start over.

And then we give up.

Pretty soon, we’ve got a bunch of half-written pieces of content that haven’t gone anywhere and haven’t done anything except annoy us.

The key is to finish it. To see it through to the end. 

Working on a post for LinkedIn? Don’t stop writing until it’s done, even if you think it’s bad. The magic happens in the edit, after all. But you’ve got to have something to edit.

Working on homepage copy? Don’t just half-write your headline and then walk away. Finish it, write the complete headline and a follow-up paragraph. Get the idea fully formed.

And then decide what needs to be fixed, changed, adjusted.

But we can’t make our marketing or writing better without actually doing it.

We’ve got to finish what we start—which doesn’t mean publishing everything we finish—so we have something to fix and improve upon.

Once it’s done, we can decide what’s fit for publishing and for the public to see.

But first, completion.

Only then do we worry about perfection.