Where's your bad writing?

There's a Seth Godin interview I've listened to many times. Last night, I listened to this episode again as I was packing the garage into the moving container.

The interview is on The Tim Ferris Podcast.

It's an interview that Seth did as he was promoting his recent book called The Practice.

What always gets me about this interview is when Seth talks about fear, and about the reluctance to publish your work.

"Everyone wants to publish their good writing, but now one wants to show me their bad writing."

Writing well requires you to fail. You will never do your best work all the time. What happens is as you write, you discover that most of it is bad, some of it is good, and a tiny fraction of it is great.

In order to get to your great writing, you are forced to get through your bad writing.

It's much harder than it sounds, because who wants to continuously be bad? Greatness requires you devastating failure.

I'm reminded of my Muay Thai training. 1 out of every 100 kicks I throw feels perfect. But in order to find that perfect kick, I need to through 99 bad kicks.

Success is failure multiplied.