Do you know the 3 little words I mean?

It’s not ‘Work with me‘, or ‘Read my blog‘ or even ‘Please pay me‘. Nope, these words are short, sweet and simple, but once I knew them, they changed everything about the way I do business.

We’re constantly bombarded with messages, memes, blogs, and email. So much email.

All day long we read, listen and watch the world go by. Everyone selling, spruiking and preaching something to anyone who’ll take notice. Some of it’s lovely, some of it’s dodgy – all of it time-consuming. But at the end of the day, it’s all just noise.

Then every now and then, something stops you in your tracks. It screams so loudly you simply can’t ignore it.

For me, that was three words in a Seth Godin blog post.

Here are those words:

‘Instinct to ship’

…those three little words, literally changed everything for me.

He’s referring of course to the frustrating tendency a lot of us have to procrastinate, tweak, mull over, re-write, fine tune, finesse, re-create, re-do, fine tweak again and again, and feel ridiculously nervous and sick before sending something out into the world.

For me, it’s my client work that keeps me up late at night. Then up again early before the kids wake up, just so I can hit the deadline.

The scary thing for me is all the infinite number of ways one can put one’s words together.

So when someone entrusts me with their words, their vision, their livelihood, I take it on as if it were my own words being represented out there in the big wide world.

I don’t want my clients to feel icky or awkward with the words that I have produced for them so I slave over the work, often for many more hours than I should be or that I have charged my client for.

This of course I realise is NOT the way to run a business or make any money at it in any case. But the thought of my clients being unhappy drives the fear in me so work harder, longer and with more nerves in my stomach than a first timer on a roller coaster.

So the words, ‘instinct to ship’ made a profound shift in me. basically, it means there are some that just want to get things done and dusted and have an innate instinct to get it out there. But for us ‘perfectionists’ which is really just another way to say ‘fearful, frightened, scaredy cat’ that instinct is low or non-existent.

But reading his words, so concise, so beautifully articulated, it made me realise this is not the way I want to run my business. any client who didn’t appreciate my work probably isn’t a good fit – I have loads of lovely clients who love everything I do – yet I still don’t ‘trust’ my instincts to ship that damn sales page off.

There’s also a lot of procrastinating that goes on in my world too – someone tell me how to turn the damn email and FB notifications off please – gah!!

But these words have become my new mantra. Just ship it, just do it. you’re good at what you do, just send it.

Of course, I don’t mean settling for shoddy work. But you’re good enough at what you do that your work is good enough. If it’s not there’s still time to redo or tweak if needed.

Tweaking is ok, that takes no time. But agonising over something, wondering if they’ll like it or not, sweating over it and getting uptight and tense about it doesn’t do you or your client any favours.

Trust yourself. Ship it!