A Case for Shitty First Drafts

One of the most consistent things we hear from people in our ecosystem is how surprised and delighted they are that lowering the bar works.

When we say lower the bar, we mean taking your idea off the pedestal and normalizing it, no longer trying to make it the best or most original thing that ever existed, but just doing any old version of it just to get it off the ground or off your plate.

MJ recently wrote about the 3 reasons you’re stuck in task freeze and one the best pieces of advice in the article is to aim for a B+. Easier said than done for a group of perfectionists, but maybe that’s why this resonates so deeply.

Another way of saying this comes from a writer Anna has referenced a few times this podcast season — Anne Lamott’s seminal work on creative process Bird by Bird uses another fantastic application of this approach: Write a shitty first draft.

And the great news is that shitty first drafts transcend the practice of writing.

Everything we have done with this company has started with a shitty first draft. The first paid version of our membership was a shitty first Patreon page. The first newsletter was a shitty first Flodesk email. The first version of our website was (yikes) a very shitty first Squarespace page. While it might feel embarrassing to think back on some of those shitty first drafts,

1. Bet you don’t have any idea what that first version of our website looked like… (no one will remember)

2. There’s no way we could be here without having been there

We’ve been working on a book proposal for the last 7 months and we’ve had FIVE shitty drafts before we got to number 6, and the whole thing has been like slowly chiseling a hunk of marble to see if there’s something beautiful we can create by slowly figuring out what doesn’t need to be there.

Perfectionism fools us into believing that if our first attempt is anything less than excellent, we must not be cut out for it. That’s when we spiral so badly that we never actually take any action. If you keep the idea of shitty first drafts in your mental repotoire, it will help you get out of your head and just start — the bar is so low that this might actually feels kind of… easy.

And when you continue to apply the idea, you might actually stumble right into a pretty good second draft and eventually uncover the excellence you were after all along.