Start the next one tomorrow
One piece of timeless wisdom that will help you build your creative life.
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Nothing. No downloads. No reviews. No revenue. Just digital silence stretching like an empty inbox at 3 AM.
In July 2012, I published my second book online—eight months of heart-poured vulnerability uploaded into the void. I'd watched other bloggers ship their PDF manifestos and grow their newsletters by thousands. Mine landed with the sound of a penny dropping in the Grand Canyon.
Mortified doesn't capture it. I was failing college, broke, watching friends land real salaries in big cities while I refreshed my download stats like a slot machine that might finally pay out. This book was supposed to prove I was on the right path. Instead, it made me question everything.
So I did what I always did when confused: I emailed someone I respected. Seth Godin responded quickly and said, “Journey, not destination.”
Steven Pressfield, whose books are my bible for the creative life, actually responded even though I had never emailed him before like I did with Seth.
I originally published this as part of another essay in 2014 for 99u. His response is a piece of wisdom I return to often.
Dear Paul,
What you're feeling is what everybody feels. Start something new right away and don't look back. Don't check the grosses, don't look up the reviews on Amazon. Seth is right (I previously emailed Seth Godin and replied “Journey, not destination.”) Get used to it.
In "The War of Art," I tell the story of when I finished my first novel (after about ten years of trying and failing), walked down the street to visit my mentor, Paul Rink, and told him the good news. He never looked up from his coffee. "Good for you," he said. "Start the next one tomorrow."
My own theory is to have the next one already in progress. I like to have thirty or forty pages of the Next Book already done (and have momentum going on it) when I finish the Current Book.
It's postpartum depression, just like with a new mother. Did you read about the despair Brooke Shields went into?
Congrats to you, Paul. You did good. You shipped. I salute you. Seth salutes you. Every other member of this select club salutes you. Get drunk. Have a party. Get laid.
Then start the next one tomorrow.
All me best, mate!
Steve
With time and miles under my belt, I see what he was really teaching me. Creative work isn't a lottery ticket; it's weight training. Every project you ship is a rep. Every time you resist checking reviews is another plate on the bar. The strength you're building isn't for this project—it's for the next one, and the one after that, and the career that emerges from a thousand shipped experiments.
Here's what nobody tells you about the creative life: believing any single project will cure your restlessness, erase your doubts, earn you so much money you don’t have to be in survival mode or be wracked with anxiety in our post-capitalism world, or rewrite your story is a kind of soft egomania. It sneaks in and kills creativity before it can breathe. You see others succeeding with what looks like inferior work, and your brain short-circuits—why them and not me?
Because they're doing reps while you're checking the mirror.
After that first disaster, author Ryan Holiday gave me feedback: my writing was too high-altitude, remixing other people's ideas instead of mining my own experience. Scary advice, of course. It's much easier to copy what other bloggers are doing. He saw right through my templated approach.
I reference my friend Sean Blanda’s timeless essay and framework, The Creative World’s Bullshit Industrial Complex.
The bullshit industrial complex is a pyramid of groups that goes something like this:
Group 1: People actually shipping ideas, launching businesses, doing creative work, taking risks and sharing first-hand learnings.
Group 2: People writing about group 1 in clear, concise, accessible language.
[And here rests the line of bullshit demarcation…]
Group 3: People aggregating the learnings of group 2, passing it off as first-hand wisdom.
Group 4: People aggregating the learnings of group 3, believing they are as worthy of praise as the people in group 1.
Groups 5+: And downward….
I was in group three. This book was my first step at being in Group 1.
My third book, Connect the Dots, reached a quality I could stand behind. Jeff Goins and Holiday wrote blurbs. My friend designed a real cover. It didn't make me rich either. But here's what I learned: that book in my portfolio signaled initiative to future employers. It opened doors to industries I never imagined entering. That one small project differentiated my resume from other writers or marketers. Writing became how I navigate the world—not the career I envied in others, but the practice that taught me I could be an artist.
Pressfield mentioned having "thirty or forty pages of the Next Book already done" when you finish the Current Book. This is wise advice, like laying out your gym clothes so you can change quickly and head out the door (because that’s the hard part).
When your identity stays attached to the thing you just shipped, you become a monument to your past. When your identity lives in what you're creating next, you become momentum itself.
The mind can only focus on a few things at once. You either focus on the practice or the scoreboard, on the process or the analytics, on the weight you're lifting or the mirror on the gym wall.
Each project becomes a timestamp—a receipt of where your skill, taste, and clarity were at that moment. Your first one? Probably a mess. But that's not failure; that's the first rep. Ship the mess. Learn what that weight feels like. Add more plates. Ship again.
You ever read Seth’s post on forty years of projects? It takes decades of failures to become an overnight success…
I check my Amazon reviews maybe once a year now, just for laughs. The royalties? I genuinely don't care. The book exists. If it helps one student embrace self-guided learning, it was worth every hour. I have a folder of notes from readers who took time to send me a lovely, thoughtful note—that's my real return on investment.
The real question was never "Will this succeed?"
It was always "Will I keep going regardless?"
Thirteen years later, I understand what Pressfield meant by "postpartum depression." Every creative act is a birth followed by a necessary emptiness. That silence I experienced wasn't failure—it was the space between reps, the pause between breaths, the rest that makes the next movement possible.
Because momentum, more than talent, more than luck, more than any success, sustains a creative life. And momentum only asks one thing of you:
Start the next one tomorrow.