380 Words

Some mornings this month, I've sat down to write my book and produced four hundred words.

And deleted three hundred and eighty of them.

Twenty words. Forty-five minutes. That's the business I'm in on the bad mornings.

This one's about the middle. The stretch where it's not new anymore, and it's not good yet.

The book is called Grace Over Guilt, same as the show. It's the fall and the rebuild, put in order, with time to get it right.

The plan was simple. Morning writing blocks. A finished first draft by the end of the year.

Simple plans look fantastic in a notebook.

Ed Mylett has a frame for this that gave me language for what I'm feeling. Every pursuit goes through three stages. Ugly. Awkward. Mesh.

Ugly is the start. You're bad at it and everybody knows it. And ugly comes with a built-in excuse. I just started.

Mesh is the far end. It clicks. You're not thinking about it anymore.

Awkward is the middle. The excuse is gone. You've been at it long enough to see what good looks like.

And you're not there.

That gap, between what you can see and what you can do, is where most dreams quietly die. Not with a crash. They just get set down. Nobody notices, because nothing blew up.

I watch this kill things every month in my line of work.

Weeks one and two of a new campaign are ugly. The platform's learning, costs bounce around, and everybody's fine with it because it's new.

Weeks three through six are awkward. Results are improving, but they're not great yet.

And week six is when I get the call. "Should we just kill it and try something else?"

The data almost always says keep going. But the owner can see what good looks like, and the gap feels unbearable. So they kill it, start over, and land right back in ugly where nobody expects anything.

Some owners run that loop for years. They never reach mesh, because mesh only lives on the other side of awkward.

I tell clients not to kill a campaign at week six. And this month I've been tempted every morning to kill my own book at week six.

The twenty words I kept turned out to be a map. They showed me where the true part was.

The three hundred and eighty I deleted were the scaffolding I had to build to find them. Every sculptor has a pile of marble on the floor.

Here's the sneaky part.

In the awkward stage, the old version of you starts looking attractive. He was competent at the old stuff. He wasn't deleting three hundred and eighty words before breakfast.

The middle makes you homesick for a man you already decided not to be.

The Israelites got out of Egypt. Out of slavery. Then they hit the wilderness, the middle, and Numbers 11:5 has them reminiscing. "We remember the fish which we ate freely in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons."

They were slaves. And in the middle, all they could remember was the cucumbers.

When an easy win from the old playbook comes calling, that's the cucumbers. Keep the old guy's tools. Don't go back for his life.

"You should be further along by now." Compared to who? Usually somebody's highlight reel. You're comparing your week six to their year six.

"This is proof you're not cut out for it." Being bad in the middle isn't proof you can't. It's proof you're in the middle.

"Something else would be easier." For about six weeks. Then you'd be in the middle of that one, hearing the same three lies.

Sometimes you should quit. Here's the test I use with clients, and now on myself.

Is it improving, even slowly? Week six better than week two means you're in the middle. No movement at all might mean a dead end.

Can you see what good looks like? In the middle, you can. That's what makes it hurt.

Are you quitting the thing, or quitting the discomfort? If you'd be relieved to skip straight to the finish line, you're not done with it. You want it.

Five hundred words a writing block, even if I delete four hundred.

One run, even if it's slow.

The workout, even if it's half the weight.

And the mirror rule. I'm going to stop checking every morning to see if I've arrived.

Every check says not yet. And every "not yet" makes the next step heavier. You don't open the oven every two minutes to see if the cake's done.

And on the record: a finished first draft by December 31. Not perfect. Finished.

Guilt in the middle says, you missed your block, get back to it tomorrow. Fair.

Shame in the middle says, who do you think you are, writing a book?

Grace says, twenty words survived. Good. Start with those tomorrow.

Zechariah 4:10. "For who has despised the day of small things?"

Galatians 6:9. "And let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart."

In due season. Not on my schedule. The only condition is don't quit in the middle.

Pick the one thing you're in the middle of right now. The one where you can see what good looks like and you're not there.

Run it through the three questions.

If it passes, write your boring plan in one line. The smallest version of the work you'll do on a bad day.

Then pick one mirror to stop checking for a week. The scale. The bank app. The follower count. The stopwatch.

Do the boring thing. Leave the mirror alone.

380 words is still a chapter that didn't exist last month. Awkward is the price. Pay it daily.

Episode 26 is live now. 380 Words. The actual morning, the good run and the bad run, the old offer that came calling, and the deadline I put on the record. Sunday's Reset wraps the whole week.

One step, one day. Grace over guilt.