Merely do the work

Just do it. The most famous company slogan of all time. Yet, it implies the wrong message.

Photo by Shubham Mittal on Unsplash

Most people interpret Just do it as “Ah, what the hell” and then proceed to wing it. Please don’t do that.

A slight tweak is all that’s needed. “Merely do it.”

Why merely instead of just? Merely means you do it with attention and care. Whatever the work may be.

Seth Godin brought this to my attention as I have been devouring his work like a great white shark on a feeding frenzy. 

I have adopted this slogan for my creative work but it can be applied to any type of work you do.

My creative work is writing (yes, writing is work). Your work could be YouTubing or it could be something else entirely, like dentistry. Regardless of what it is, all that is required is to merely do the work. Rain or shine. This means you do it even when you don’t feel like it because it’s what you do.

Writers have come up with this funny excuse called writers block. Where they claim they can’t write. But it isn’t real. It’s a disguise for fear. Do dentists experience dentist block? Of course not. They merely do their work every single day because they decided to be a dentist.

Remove future decisions

I made the decision to remove a thousand future decisions when it comes to writing. I decided to sit down every morning at 7:00 and set a creativity timer for one hour and merely do the work of writing. I don’t agonize over the decision of whether I feel like writing or not. Sleepy or energized. Inspired or uninspired. Every single day. Some days are effortless. Most days are effortful. But it’s one less decision I have to make. And I am realizing that this is the key to creating anything meaningful.

I don’t wait for inspiration to strike me like a bolt of energetic lightning. Because that would result in me rarely, if ever, doing the work. I merely write, which results in copious amounts of embarrassingly bad writing, but every once in a while good writing comes out.

Put time in the calendar

I haven’t discovered anything new here. Study any great practitioner and you realize that all they’ve done is committed to merely doing the work everyday.

Issac Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time. He published over four hundred books back when publishing a book was still hard to do. He accomplished this feat by merely doing the work. He sat down at his typewriter every morning from 6:30am-12:30pm. He would type and type and type until his time was up. He realized if he was going to write for six hours a day he might as well write something good. Imagine how much bad writing he had to pry out of his mind before the good writing peeked its head out of the clouds. Enough to fill thousands of books.

His decision was to merely do the work and the results took care of themselves. What creative work is lying dormant inside of you begging to be unleashed?

The scary realization is that your excuses are useless. Think you don’t have any good ideas to share? You’re wrong. Show me the thousands of bad ideas you’ve had. If you can’t, then you're lying to yourself.

The only difference between you and the greats you admire is that they have put in the reps. They failed over and over again until they got good. They merely did the work. So what’s stopping you?

Get your failed reps up

This brings me to my 1% rule. You need to put in at least one hundred reps of whatever you’ve chosen to do before you can expect one to take off. Knowing this will feel freeing. The challenge is not knowing which one will be THE one. It could be the first (unlikely) or it could be the one hundredth. So merely keep doing the work. You owe it to yourself, and more importantly, to the world.

I am on rep #43 when it comes to my writing (31 essays and 12 newsletters). I’ve still got a long way to go. But that’s fine with me because I have decided to merely show up and do the work. I don’t control the outcome. But I do control the process. What number are you on?

100 business ideas. 100 paintings. 100 speeches. 100 blog posts. 100 youtube videos. It doesn’t matter what the medium is. All that matters is that you merely keep going.

The audience takes care of itself

I started out writing with an audience of zero. That gave me the freedom to tinker and practice with no worries of whether it would be loved or ridiculed. To my surprise, I gained my first audience member (thanks mom), then my tenth (gracias amigos - Zac, Scott, and David) next will be my one hundredth (thanks stranger-turned-friend). The only secret was that I merely did the work without worrying about who was watching. How big is your audience? Spoiler: it doesn’t need to be huge. I wrote about this in more depth in my essay Become known well.

What work do you merely want to do?

I have discovered so much about myself through the process of merely doing the writing. It has given me a level of confidence that wasn’t there prior. What if you don’t want to write like me? That’s alright. But I know there is some type of work that you want to do that you’ve been putting off longer than getting that mole on your hip checked out. The hard part is starting. The fun part is continuing.

So what work do you merely want to commit to for the long haul? It’s just you and the work. Nothing else. You gotta do it. I’ll be cheering you on as I continue to merely do my work.

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Thank you to my editors: Arjun A., Brian A., Ethan C., and Karena S.