If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly

For most of 2013 I tried and tried to get myself to write newsletter articles.

I just couldn’t make myself do it. It wasn’t until I joined an article writing challenge in February 2014 that I discovered the secret.

What we agreed to do in the challenge was to produce an article a day for a hundred days. In thebeginning of the challenge, one of the participants posted an article quoting Jerry Seinfeld as saying a comedian’s job isn’t to write a funny joke every day. A comedian’s job is to write new material every day, funny or not.

The goal was consistency, not talent.

If a comic wrote new material every day, every now and then something he wrote would be funny. But if he waited until he came up with a funny joke before writing new material, well, there wouldn’t be that many jokes.

Adapting that advice, I told myself that my work wasn’t to write a good article every day. Rather, my work was to write an article every day. A bad article qualified.

So I wrote my hundred articles for the challenge.

And I kept going. I wrote 286 articles in 2014.

A hundred of those articles were sent to my newsletter list, and I’m continuing to send an article out five days a week.

Every day when I write an article, I still remind myself that I don’t have to write a good article. Even if I write a bad article, I’m doing my job.

Sure, a few of them have been stinkers.

But most of them have been good (or good enough). The magic of giving myself permission to “do them badly” means that I get them done.

Why am I telling you all this? Because this concept has been ground-breaking for me. It’s been the little bit extra alignment that has allowed some very long-held dreams to manifest.

I’m calling this process: “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.”

What I think makes it effective is, it puts self-judgment aside.

I’m no longer trying to argue with an inner judge who says my writing is lousy. I just say, That doesn’t matter; it’s not my job to write well. My job is to write, and I get credit for writing badly.

How can you apply this? Well, that depends on your dream.

Think of a long-desired manifestation that you haven’t manifested. Is there a way you can allow it into your experience “badly”?

There is obviously a fine line between “doing it badly” to release resistance, and “doing it badly” as a way of muscling into action before the energy is aligned. What we’re aiming for is a way of finding consistency while releasing perfectionism and judgment.

Doing something “badly” is just a play on words.

What we’re really doing is finding a non-contradicted way of consistently focusing on what we want.

How well does it work? Well, I wrote 286 articles in 2014 but it was only after I’d written 186 that I began sending the articles out to my newsletter mailing list. That means it took 186 “bad” articles before I felt my writing had improved to a level where I was ready to send my work out on a daily basis.

And even though I have made this my practice and feel that I’ve gotten good at writing — I still have to trick myself into doing it each day by saying that my job is to write a bad article today.

What do you want to do?

Do you want to write a book? Run a 10K? Learn to cook? Grow your own vegetables? Take up dancing?

Consider being willing to do it “badly” rather than waiting to do it well. As with my writing, that may be what shifts the energy just enough to release the resistance.

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All Abraham material is copyright J&E Hicks. This article represents Teresa Rogovsky's personal understanding of the teachings of Abraham.