I can already see it.

  • You've spent the last couple hours touching up and polishing your first ever article draft you've spent all day writing.
  • Your headline has been vetted by friends and family.
  • You made sure that they're all wide awake so that they can like your article when it goes live.

You're doing everything you can to make sure that it's perfect so that you have the best start possible to your writing career.

I'm going to save you the suspense and burst your bubble:

Your article isn't gonna come out spectacular.

Now before you take out the pitchforks and get upset with me, I'd like to give you an important reminder.

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Everybody's first anything is going to suck.

And that's totally ok.

Anything is better than nothing

Birds don't just spread their wings and fly the moment they hatch.

Neither will you when you're taking your first steps into any new territory.

What does that mean, though? Does that mean you're going to sit in the bird's nest for the rest of your life?

Heck no.

You can't expect anything you make to be perfect the first time around. You've never done it before so how can it possibly be perfect?

The trick to getting good at anything is to accept that you're going to suck at first.

You have to be a fool before you can become a genius.

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It's not so much that the first step has to be perfect – it's that you have to make sure you take a first step at all.

I wrote my first piece of content online in 2015 when I was going through the darkest time of my childhood.

My circumstances were a little different from most's because I was in a place where I needed an outlet to get my thoughts out. I wasn't concerned with the quality of what I was publishing.

I was pissed off, lonely, and sad. I didn't care about polishing anything. I needed to itch the itch on my mind.

And so while I didn't ever go through the mental roadblocks of things like:

  • "Is my article good enough to hit 'publish?'"
  • "Is anyone even going to read what I write?"
  • "What will people think of me when they see this?"

That doesn't mean I can't give a nudge to future content creators and people who are trapped with fear and doubt.

You can't get to 100 without passing 1

Think of someone who's accomplished a lot.

Someone who in your eyes is a genius. A recognized authority. An influential figure. Someone who's where you want to be.

What you're looking at when you see them is 100. You're not looking at their 1, 2, or 3.

You see the end result and the level they're at looks unattainable.

I can promise you that they didn't get where they are overnight.

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Even Gordon Ramsay has burnt food and messed up his dishes.

Did that stop him from becoming one of the best chefs in the world? No.

High levels of success and accomplishment are not things you can just hit on the first try. So you overthinking your first product, article, podcast episode, cake, t-shirt, whatever, isn't doing you any flavors– I mean, favors.

One of the most common traps that stunts people's growth is the one that stops people before they even take their first step.

It's why I already saved you the suspense in the title of the article – your first anything will suck.

Get over it and focus on getting your first thing out of the way.

This isn't to say that you should put close to zero effort on your first thing. You should still make an effort to make a good first product.

The point is that it's not going to be perfect. Perhaps no one will see it, buy it, taste it, or read it. And that's totally fine.

Keep honing your craft and consistently look for areas to work on and improve in.

You won't get to 100 on Day 1, but you have to start somewhere.

Focus on Day 1 first before thinking about 100.