I'm a quitter

GoDaddy reminds me every month...

GoDaddy reminds me every month that I’m a quitter.

I quit a romantic comedy blog I started in my twenties. I quit an e-commerce business called sweetyogapants.com. A millennial publishing company called Palooza Press. A merch line called DPCA.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

I have logos for companies that never made it onto business cards. Websites sitting untouched in a Squarespace graveyard. My wife and I have an idea for a sandwich shop called Chips. A coffee company called Booch & Bean.

All of these ideas started with creative momentum. That intoxicating brainstorm that leads to grand visions of unfulfilled potential and million-dollar buyouts. Most of them lasted less than a year (if they ever got off the ground at all).

Over the years, I’ve learned that quitting is a good thing. As long as that “no” turns your attention toward the thing you actually care about. The thing you’ll pursue long enough to earn the reward from outlasting the people who quit when things get hard.

For me, it has always been writing.

The Dip by Seth Godin is my favorite book. In it, he says:

“A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner.”

Last week, a friend called me after reading my Substack. He was just checking in. He said my letter to my younger self might have unintentionally come across a little pessimistic. To him, it almost read like I was releasing my dream of writing novels. Like I was almost mocking my younger self who was foolish enough to believe he could be a New York Times bestseller. The young kid who pecked 19,999 times at the tree, then left before he got his dinner.

That wasn’t my intention, but it made me ask some hard questions. The truth is, I don’t know exactly how it’s all going to turn out. I don’t know if hard work and persistence are enough. And yet…

I got up the next morning and went right back to work on the next book.

In his 2014 commencement address at Maharishi University, Jim Carrey famously said, “You can fail at what you don’t love, so you might as well fail at what you do love.”

We can’t ask much more from life than to find the thing that makes us come alive. The thing that makes us dream. The thing that stretches our imagination. That gives us the courage to take risks and be bold. For others, this thing feels like work. Not to us. It’s the thing we gladly do on nights and weekends.

Godin also says in his book, “Persistent people are able to visualize the idea of light at the end of the tunnel when others can’t see it.”

And the truth is, I do believe. I believe each book I write is better. I believe one of them will eventually outsell all the others. I believe I’ve been called to this for a reason.
Even if it only reaches the readers it’s meant to reach. This is the work only I can do.

What’s the one thing only you can make?

That work that people find unbearable, but you do it in your off time. The thing that holds your taste, your fingerprints, your passion. Your strange little way of seeing the world. The thing no tokenized AI model can create.

What’s your 1/1?

Let’s keep pecking at the tree.

-K

---

Here’s the Jim Carey Commencement speech that quote came here!

You should also read, The Dip by Seth Godin, if you haven’t. It only takes a few hours to read!

Thanks for reading this week!