11.02.06 Writing Inside The Lines

I’ve written and rewritten large chunks of my book five times now.  I’m doing it again.

My fear of failure and inability to finish anything that I know won’t be perfect are mostly to blame - along with poor time management skills, a lack of discipline and a dozen or so more character flaws that I’ll keep between me and the other folks in my head.

But then there’s this too…

Seth Godin writes about my predicament today in a piece called Coloring Inside The Lines:

People who want to do a good job are more likely to follow instructions that they know they can successfully accomplish, while they’ll often ignore the ‘softer’ tasks if they can.

If you’re marketing a product or an idea to a group of people and you juxtapose two ideas--one obvious and simple while the other is challenging and subtle, you can bet the mass of people will grab the first one (if they don’t ignore you altogether).