The Rare Advantage Hiding Inside Your Unfinished Work
Consistency is not about volume. It is about leaving enough useful evidence for people to believe you.
I owe this blog an apology.
For months, I signed off my articles with… “I publish to Protocol every week”. Even then, the ideas I put onto Substack each week were a glint in the sunshine. I was putting stuff out daily on Twitter/X and occasionally Medium. In a 3-day sprint in March, I even wrote a 5,000-word educational email course.
I was building serious momentum.
Then…owing to a combination of circumstances and personal issues, I stopped writing out of the blue.
As the story goes, I’d taken a trip to Malaysia to visit family. It was my uncle’s 70th birthday, so my partner and I flew out to attend the birthday dinner. I brought my laptop and some books, telling myself I’d work when I was out there…
…and the rest of that story tells itself, really.
No problem—two weeks of radio silence isn’t exactly the end of the world. But when I got back to it, I just felt…drained. It wasn’t just burnout. It was getting caught between two of my own, seemingly contradictory, beliefs:
Don’t overthink. Kill your perfectionism.
“Just show up every day” is cope. If something gets ignored, the truth is it wasn’t worth reading.
But just as I thought I’d almost literally written myself into a corner, I read something that gave me a much-needed kick up the rear, bringing my perspective right back down to Earth.
The 99% club
Part of why I took a break from more “creative” writing was that I’ve been focused on research, case studies and outreach.
It’s been worthwhile. A few months of studying what real businesses are doing—and figuring out their opportunities—has taught me more than most books ever could (interested? Watch this space).
But in studying some of my old business material on outreach, I came across a curious sentiment:
“Fire and forget” is where outreach goes to die.
Hardly anybody follows up an initial message. If you don’t hear anything and chase up politely after a week, you’re already out of the 99% club.
It got me thinking. I’m not going to say “sending an initial email” is the easy part because it isn’t. As someone who used to get gummed up trying to send birthday messages to their own relatives, I do know that hitting the “send” button can be hard.
Still, at least with birthday messages, you only need to send them once.
Outreach is different. Sometimes people aren’t interested. But sometimes, they just missed it. It might have got buried, or you just caught them at an awkward moment. Following up politely and respectfully is critical.
If you’re willing to go that extra length? You’re ahead of 99% of people.
And the same mostly is true of writing a newsletter or blog…staying out of the 99% club is almost entirely in the follow-through.
But, here’s where I’m going to break with conventional wisdom.
Consistency isn’t the hard part anymore
I still believe boring or pointless work will—and should—get ignored.
And honestly? I bet I could “consistently” write hundreds of posts every month, especially with the help of AI—if the goal was to be boring or pointless.
That’s not where I got stuck, though.
I did want to be consistent. But I also wanted—perhaps needed—my work to be valuable to the right people. An admirable goal, but one which got so deeply embedded in my head, I was micro-analysing everything so much that I started struggling to publish anything at all. I was making each piece carry so much weight that publishing became impossible to sustain.
The mistake was assuming “consistency” and “quality” were mutually antagonistic goals.
The reality? Both of them are different forms of the thing we’re really striving for.
What we really need is evidence
Consistency shouldn’t be about proving that you’re able to hit publish every week.
Quality shouldn’t be about making sure every sentence can survive a courtroom cross-examination.
Both of them are evidence that you take your work seriously.
Evidence that you understand people’s problems (writing).
Evidence that you’re worth paying attention to (social media).
Evidence you can be trusted (follow-through).
Evidence you’re worth doing business with (outreach).
Evidence that you can be useful to others (the quality of…pretty much anything).
And that is, indeed, the rare advantage hiding inside your unfinished work—not the work itself, but the evidence inside it.
The abandoned blog. The graveyard of unfinished article drafts. The notes from real conversations. The ideas you never wrote down or fleshed out because you figured you’d “get to it later”.
You probably don’t need totally new ideas, an overhauled strategy or a blank page to prove how useful you are.
Your existing work is rarely as dead as you think. It’s just waiting for you to make it useful.
After all. It’s true that how you do anything is how you do everything.
About that picture…
My trip to Malaysia was probably when my momentum took a hit, but it doesn’t mean it wasn’t a blast. I met family, took thousands of pictures and saw parts of Kuala Lumpur I haven’t seen since I was a child.
When my partner and I walked into the zoo in Kuala Lumpur, we were ushered straight into another queue. Turns out, the first thing we had to do was let a photographer set us in front of a backdrop and pose for a series of pictures (“Happy! Angry! Confused!”)
We were playing along until the photographer said, “Kiss your wife!” at which point my partner (not my wife, at the time of writing) burst out laughing.
And that created a memory we wanted to take home with us.
I publish to Protocol every week (yes, really). So much so, I’ve already written next week’s entry. What’s it about, you ask? Well…all I’ll say is it has something to do with pandas. 🐼
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