Hey friend,

I hope that you are doing fantastic. Today, we are going to talk about creative/side projects.

This letter has 3 parts:

• Post-mortem on a few of my failed projects 💀

• How to actually execute on your projects ✅

• New project I am working on 📝

So let’s get into it.

Failed Project Post-Mortem

At the end of this letter, I’ll tell you about a new project, but before I do that I want to tell you about a few of my projects that have never truly seen the light of day.

I am always chewing on ideas, big and small.

And I actually have no problem with “starting“ projects and I am also quite good at getting through the heavy lifting, as well. But over the last couple of years, I’ve really struggled with bringing my projects over the finish line.

Here are a few projects that I put heaps of work into, but never finished:

• The Fitness Journey. A book about my experiences with becoming an athlete, from when I was a little kid, up until now. I wrote over 100,000 words and then stopped.

• The Morning Walk Manifesto. A short book about the importance of walking every morning (pretty self explanatory). I finished writing everything but then wasn’t sure what to do next, so I just moved onto something else.

• The Edge Protocol. A fitness guidebook based on my training for the “10 Minute Challenge“. Wrote a killer 5 part outline, wrote out the first 2 parts (13,000 words), and then life happened, and I shifted my focus elsewhere.

• Seek The Cold. A nice little cold therapy ebook that I worked on with my business partner Tom Thornton. I couldn’t pull together a good promotion around this, so it was shelved. FYI, this ebook gave me the foundation for Letter 14 and Letter 15 of this newsletter.

• The Magic Excavator. A beautiful children’s book that I wrote for my son, using AI generated imagery throughout. The plan was to print/publish it, but that still hasn’t happened. You can check it out on Canva here, though.

The sad thing is that this isn’t even a complete list. These are just the ones that got the furthest… over the last 2 years.

I can get to 80% complete but for whatever reason, during the last 20%, I fall apart…

• Maybe it is because I don’t know what to do.

• Maybe it is because I don’t ask for help enough.

• Maybe it is because I don’t actually think it will succeed.

So, I’ll set the project aside and assume that I’ll pick it back up soon. But what happens is that I lose the momentum and excitement of the project. The weeks and months will pass and my work will collect dust. Meanwhile, I’ll find a new idea that I want to explore and I’ll start the process all over again. And thus, the cycle repeats itself.

But I’ve decided that I want to break the cycle.

Now, before I go to much further (and for the sake of my ego), I don’t want to make it seem like all of my projects have failed.

Aside from learning a ton, I’ve…

• Published hundreds of videos on TikTok across 2 accounts,

• Published 36 consecutive letters for this newsletter.

• Mostly learned a second language (Tagalog)

So don’t worry - all is certainly not lost. My ambition is raging as usual and my skills continue to grow each day. It is just frustrating to look at hundreds of hours of work and know that if I had put in just a little bit more effort then I would have a lot more to show for it. 

Anyways, let’s talk about breaking the cycle and actually “shipping“ your work.

How To Ship Your Projects

If you struggle with executing on your projects, here are 5 things that could help:

1. Follow your interests. This makes the process enjoyable and keeps you from getting lost in the details or afraid of the mountain of work that you (might) have in front of you.

2. Don’t think too far ahead. Analysis paralysis will kill you and suck the joy out of building something cool.

3. When you start, plan on finishing. Try to imagine what the “minimum successful version“ is and fight as hard as you can to make that happen.

4. Don’t get lost in your ambition. It can suffocate your project before it even has a chance.

5. Make yourself accountable and ask for help. If you want guaranteed success with shipping your work, then surround yourself with people that want to see your projects come to life.

I fully recognize the irony of this list, given the list of failed projects we’ve covered in this letter.

New Project Teaser

Yes, instead of just finishing the -zillion- projects that I have sitting around, I am going to be launching another.

Here is a one sentence description of my upcoming project:

The reason I know that this one will be “shipped“ is because:

1. I am setting my expectations low for the first iteration.

2. I am exploring a concept that is genuinely interesting to me.

3. I have people helping me.

(double check the list from earlier and you will see that this checks every single box).

But that is all that I’m going to tell you about it, for now. I will definitely need people to beta test with, so stay tuned for more info over the next few weeks/months!

That is all that I have for you this week.

Stay golden,

Cliff