Uber overlord of the blogosphere Seth Godin just published all he’s shipped in 2010, and asked us to publish a list of what we’ve got out the door this year:
“This might be a useful exercise. Doesn’t matter whether it was a hit or not, it just matters that you shipped it. Shipping something that scares you (and a lot of what follows did) is the entire point.”
Along with half the internet, I view Seth Godin as my personal guru; even though his blog is read my many thousands (maybe millions) of people, he has an uncanny ability to talk directly to me and inspires me multiple times per week.
So when he asks me to do something I do it. Here goes…
- This website. I started working on version 1 of mikemonday.com in October 2009. That iteration didn’t do much that was useful, had an appalling design and hit the web in late January 2010. Since then I’ve done two major redesigns and numerous tweaks. I like it now.
- 10 tracks 10 weeks. This was the ultimate exercise in “shipping”. And I did it. I wrote my third album one track a week for ten weeks. I rarely had time to “make sure” and try out much more than my first ideas. This scared me senseless. But doing this made me physically experience what I’d suspected. It’s way more important to get it done than make it perfect.
- My favourite blog posts. It often takes me longer to press publish than to write a blog post. That’s because I’m scared. Sometimes I’ll wait for days after writing a piece; the longest was about three weeks. But almost without exception, the posts where I felt most fear became my favourite.
- The Music Success In Nine Weeks blogging challenge. This blog series vanished from this site when I transferred my blog to another service and I haven’t got off my ass and put them back up. Suffice to say that I read and implemented the steps in Ariel Hyatt’s book and blogged about the experience. For someone used to only writing and performing music, marketing myself was hard but talking about it in public was much harder.
- Other music. 2010 was the year where I moved from from releasing music on record labels to doing it myself, and there were some bits and pieces that went out through traditional labels. Looking back, there are some advantages to someone else releasing my music, but these are completely negated by how disconnected I am from my audience.
- My first YouTube video. I meant to do more of these but only managed one. I *hate* watching and hearing myself speak but I’ll just have to get over it. I need to work on my delivery because video is the ideal way for me to talk about and play my music to you. Expect much more of it in 2011.
- You lot. Until recently this site has been largely about me broadcasting and releasing my shizzle. But I’m shifting my focus to your shizzle. After I got over my internal resistance to writing it, I finally sent out my first mailout yesterday and got an overwhelming response. I’m in the middle of answering all your wonderful emails and they’re still arriving (keep them coming). So far I’ve received replies from UK, Iraq, Kazakhstan, all over the USA, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Russia, Portugal and Spain. And after just one mailout, this is the part of my business that excites me the most. I now have a much clearer idea of what you need and want me to do. I just wish I’d overcome my fear earlier and got on with it.
- The birth of Harry. Not a work thing, but my review of 2010 wouldn’t be complete without a mention of the little dude. Although it’s more accurate to say that Mrs. Monday did the “shipping” on this one (I guess I “shipped” 9 months earlier in 2009 – ahem), becoming a Dad is easily the most scary and wonderful event of my life.
So that’s me more or less done with 2010. If I was to sum it up in a word? Transition.
How was yours? What did you ship this year?
Oh and have a very Happy New Year…