Good morning Friends,

In the last few weeks, I’ve had a handful of different people ask me the same exact question:

Q: How did you get so prolific?

Q: How do you write so much and have it be good?

Q: How are you so insanely productive?

Reflecting on this, I realized that I’d given a different answer every time.

A: I meditate every day. And I practice free-writing. I call these my flow practices. They open my pipeline for inspiration, which I’ve learned to turn into inspired action immediately.

A: I’ve cultivated something I call Monk Mode, and I take vows, cloister up and create sacred space for my deepest, most important work when it beckons.

A: I get help. And I hire well. Even when I’m “hiring” volunteers.

A: I’ve systematically unrepressed myself, gotten clarity as to my personal purpose and focus and crafted an entire lifestyle that supports who I really am and why I’m on this planet.

And I wasn’t even done. There are a handful of skills and beliefs and actions—which I think of collectively as ‘practices’—that have really flipped the ‘prolific’ switch on for me over the years.

I thought I’d share them under this umbrella of Practices of the Prolific. And they’re not just for writers. They work anytime you want to turn your thoughts into things.

Here’s the first one I want to share. I call it IMPERFECTIONISM.

I have a solid, internal spirit of excellence. I want the things I create to be beautiful and impactful. Excellence is doing your very best, whatever that is on a given day, in a way that constantly expands your capacity to create.

Excellence is expansion.

But excellence is not perfection.

When it comes to creating a book, film, organization, community, family or life you love, “spirit of excellence” can slippery slope its way into “perfectionism.”

And that’s not good. Because perfectionism stops you before you ever start. Perfectionism shrinks down the exact boldness it takes to create new things: the boldness that is the essence of creativity and innovation.

Awhile back, between books, I started reading about writing. And I came across Anne Lamott’s book, “Bird by bird,” in which she urges writers to dive into the process of creating something she calls an SRD: a shi!$y rough draft.

When I started writing to write a SRD instead of trying to write a brilliant masterpiece, the whole game changed. The prolific switch flipped to ‘on’. Because when you’re aiming to write something great, you unintentionally activate an unholy trinity of blocks fueled by perfectionism: Inner Editor, Inner Critic and Inner Censor. If you allow these energies to take over, they’ll have you writing a single sentence, then agonizing, rewriting and ruminating over that sentence. You can lose a whole day (or week) that way.

But when you aim to write an SRD, the whole point is for the writing to be bad. So you turn off Inner Editor. Deactivate Inner Critic. Tell Inner Censor you’ll see her later. And then something incredible happens. You realize that there really is a pipeline of infinite intelligence trying to flow through you and to you at all times. It has all the energy and every idea you’ll ever want or need. And it’s already in you.

But you can pinch yourself off from the pipeline with fear, grudges, self-criticism and (you guessed it) perfectionism.

When you aim to write an SRD, you give yourself permission to write something bad. And then you had better buckle up, because the pipeline opens up and inspiration flows in.

Catch this principle: your brain cannot work in flow mode and edit mode at the same time. Everything great that was ever written was essentially written in flow mode. Then the brilliant, final piece was sculpted and edited out of that. That’s the beauty of the SRD. It allows you to have the voluminous output AND the blissful experience of creating in flow mode. It’s harnesses the incredible leverage of inspired action.

You can come back around and edit later. That’s how it comes to be that the SRD is the prerequisite of basically everything great.

Then there’s the matter of practice. Practice hours come as a happy accident of writing in uncensored, unedited flow mode. And they trigger another happy accident in turn: you get good. Over time, your SRDs start to be way, way less shitty, so to speak. They might even start to become good. And then great. This makes the dreaded chore of editing way less burdensome, with time.

That said, if you write to create an SRD, you might learn to love the entire creative process—including the editing—instead of just holding your breath through the whole thing to get to the beautifully polished final draft. You might start to feel that writing helps you process your world and manage your own chemistry. And that editing what you write is the final fun of sculpting the clay of your own creation.

And surprise: this ain’t just about writing. It’s about creating ANYTHING. There’s even a version of the concept of the SRD that applies for business and especially for tech businesses: the MVP or minimum viable product. [I wrote more about that in this video on what I call Lean Life Methodology.]

For the past few months I’ve really been focused on Lean Startup and Lean Life Methodology, as I’m working to get SoulTour fully up and running. I’ve been practicing being ok with rolling out bits and pieces of the vision, exposing them to the market and using customer feedback to build the launch-ready version.

Reid Hoffman (VC and founder of LinkedIn) has become the Anne Lamott of my entrepreneurial journey, by way of this quote:

“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

I use this standard all the time to give myself permission to put things out the door that are great, but not perfect. Because if I wait for perfect, I’ll have waited too long to learn what I need to know to make the next right move. And I’ll have underserved my audience, who is requesting things I can deliver now in an excellent, but imperfect, way.

On the other hand, when I just begin and launch the imperfect thing, I get crystal clear on what to create next. I see what works and what doesn’t, I see how the audience responds, I see how I feel about it once it’s in the world, and I get a level of clarity about the next step to take that I’d have never had just sitting in a room soul-searching for concrete, granular action items.

For me, the concepts of the SRD and MVP far transcend my writing and my business. Now it’s an overarching lens for my whole life. I’ve rebranded it IMPERFECTIONISM. As I move through the world and through the timeline of my life, I make it my goal to create beautiful, impactful, imperfect things.

I’ll throw the gathering at my house while the backyard is overgrown. I’ll launch a limited version of the ad campaign before the product is fully built, so I can connect with the customers that are drawn to it and learn how best to serve them. I’ll film a video at my desk with my phone, instead of in the studio with a production crew.

Now mind you, I still embody a spirit of excellence. So the content will be .

But I’d rather write an inspired book every year than a perfect book every 10.

Because perfect, as the saying goes, is the enemy of done. And that makes it the enemy of people like us.

SoulTour in the news: I’m on the tail end of my mostly unplugged Europe > East Coast vacation, so imagine my surprise when SoulTour was covered by Forbes!

Much has changed since I gave this interview months back, but the upshot is still right: we’re on a mission to help you care for your soul and live with freedom, growth and joy. Enjoy!

Forbes: How A Spirituality Startup Is Solving Silicon Valley’s Religious Apathy

Head up + heart out,

TNN

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