Are you underestimating the value of your work?
How I almost threw away 175,000 words I had ALREADY written.
© Austin Neill on Unsplash
How often do you minimize the value of your hard work?
I left an older, successful genre after burning out a few years ago. New stuff I wrote seemed too random and disconnected, so I assumed it “didn’t count.”
But it did! In the period of exploration and discovery, I had completed the following.
I PUBLISHED:
• 2 additional books.
• Just a few blog posts.
• 2 beta classes.
•A book outline product.
HIDDEN and UNUSED:
• 2 books (still unpublished, but edited and ready to go).
• 148 blog posts leftover from my earlier genre.
• A TV pilot and proposal.
• Personal essays and short stories.
If you left the known world to venture out into new creative territory, you might be making the same mistake.
Is there expertise of yours that you’re taking for granted?
Is older work of yours related to new work in ways you don’t realize?
How can you link the old and new worlds?
In my case, I sat down and had a deep think about KEYWORDS. I made 2 mindmaps. Then I thought of all the primary topic areas for my 2 genres:
• OLD: divorced family relationships, conflict resolution, collaboration
• NEW: writing and publishing, project management, failing forward
Where was the overlap?
That question led to my lightbulb moment.
There is a clear throughline that runs thru all my writing. Some of my favorite obsessions were now more obvious:
• transforming negative beliefs
• conducting personal experiments
• being bravely honest
Which made me remember all that “lost” work!
So, I gathered it up, printed it out, put it into binders, and most importantly…did a word count.
And that’s when I almost fell off my chair.
175,000 words is not nothing! Surely, there’s value there. And editing to be done too, of course.
I feel really excited about all the new things I can make now, with themes that I can trust and lean into.
How about you?
What projects did you start, work hard at, then abandon?
If you take a look back at all your creative assets, what would you find?
Can you round up everything you made before and look at it again with new eyes? Who might it help?
What new insights do you now have about your older work? Anything that excites you? And WHAT NOW?
I still have drudgery ahead of me to pull everything together.
• Broken website SEO.
• Adding pictures to all those blog posts.
• New keywords to rank for.
• Bravely posting, even though I feel like a newbie starting over.
I hope I’ve helped you see your past efforts differently.
🔨What results of yours have you overlooked?
⚡️Did this thread spark any new ideas for you?
Sometimes we don’t need to take another course or acquire a new skillset that’s going to take years to develop.
