{"id":95,"date":"2009-03-01T17:30:49","date_gmt":"2009-03-02T00:30:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/workingknowledge.com\/blog\/?p=95"},"modified":"2023-03-02T21:29:08","modified_gmt":"2023-03-03T03:29:08","slug":"go-for-practice-not-perfection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.workingknowledge.com\/blog\/go-for-practice-not-perfection\/","title":{"rendered":"Go for Practice, not Perfection"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Point<\/strong>: Jump in and create, don&#8217;t worry about getting it right the first time<\/p>\n<p><strong>Story<\/strong>: My friend Joel wanted to write a novel.  He took classes. He turned in assignments.  But, he just inched along because he tried to perfect each piece. Then he heard about &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/National_Novel_Writing_Month\">National Novel Writing Month<\/a>.&#8221;  The goal: write a 175-page novel during the month of November.  Sounds intimidating &#8212; 50,000 words &#8212; but it comes down to 1666 words a day.<\/p>\n<p>My first reaction was, &#8220;but would the novel make sense?&#8221;  Joel pointed out that the rationale was not to have a publisher-ready novel in a month. &#8220;The point is practice,&#8221; he said, &#8220;and to have much more material to work with than you&#8217;d have otherwise.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>To meet the fast pace of the challenge, Joel had to give up his inner critic and just crank out some writing every day.  Now he&#8217;s got the draft of a novel. He&#8217;s got some gems, and he&#8217;s got material to refine.<\/p>\n<p>This process applies to writing business plans, marketing collateral, sketching new product ideas and other daunting tasks.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Action<\/strong>: The first step is to set a goal with a deadline. Then commit to making some progress every day.  Rolling up your sleeves and jumping into a task creates momentum.  The result is something tangible that you can refine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jump in and create, don&#8217;t worry about getting it right the first time. Rolling up your sleeves and jumping into a task creates momentum.  The result is something tangible that you can refine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[9,5,11,10],"tags":[17,32],"class_list":["post-95","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-creativity","category-how-to","category-innovation","category-productivity","tag-goals","tag-progress"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.workingknowledge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.workingknowledge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.workingknowledge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.workingknowledge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.workingknowledge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.workingknowledge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2303,"href":"http:\/\/www.workingknowledge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions\/2303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.workingknowledge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.workingknowledge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.workingknowledge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}