Leadership: Silver Lining

This has been exceptionally difficult.

I'm finishing a new book on leadership. As part of this process, I have been using a grammar checking routine to polish the text.

Fortunately, this routine has found a ton of things to fix. (If each one of these things cost a pound of time, they would end up weighing a ton because there have been a huge number of them.)

Some of these things were style quirks. Some were oversights. Some were ordinary typos.

As you might expect, I have not enjoyed spending a couple of days working through this mess. Each correction was a puzzle, requiring a solution. Some were easy. Most were difficult. Sometimes I had to rewrite an entire paragraph to fix one word.

This experience has taught me some lessons about writing.

1) Each revision brought me closer to the result that I want. I found it useful to remind myself of this when the size of the task felt overwhelming.

2) I had to write the original draft with all its mistakes before I could improve upon it. Thus, the original draft was actually a successful effort, instead of a big failure.

3) Finding mistakes makes me more alert to what mistakes look like. Thus, I improved upon my ability to avoid making them in the future.

Notice how these lessons apply to the things that we encounter as we work our way through completing our projects.
 

Whether it's work, writing, or life, it's all the same.

Key Point: We're always working on a rough draft of the next version, which then becomes our rough draft of the next one.

Much success,

Steve Kaye

714-528-1300

Author, Speaker, IAF Certified Professional Facilitator

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