My kids asked me to tell them jokes the other night, so I finally got to pull a book off the shelf that I wrote five years ago and read it to them.
It's called Dad Jokes: Groan-Worthy Best, and I'll be honest, it isn't that funny. It's exactly what the title says. My kids laughed anyway, which means either they have great taste in bad humour or they just love their dad. I'm going with both.
The funniest part to me isn't the jokes. It's the story behind them.
The worst Christmas gift I've ever received
A month before I wrote it, my parents gave me a joke book for Christmas. It was bad. The formatting was atrocious, the jokes were subpar, and the only graphic in the whole thing was a millennial moustache.
Around the same time I was rereading The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss, another millennial cornerstone. And it dawned on me: I wonder how much the guy who wrote that joke book made selling it on Amazon.
So down the rabbit hole I went, learning how book sales on Amazon actually work. It didn't take long to realize he was making a lot of money on a pretty average product.
The difference was that he was willing to put his work out there. He had an idea, and instead of thinking about it, talking about it with friends, or finishing it and never hitting publish, he did the work and got paid for it.
So I decided to take what I'd learned from Ferriss and see if I could write a joke book of my own.
Nine days
From the day I started to the day it became an Amazon bestseller was nine days.
It wasn't enough to pack up and move to Costa Rica. It was a nice quick win. And usually around Father's Day and Christmas, a little extra money still shows up in my account from something I did five years ago and haven't touched since.
But the money was never the best part. The book taught me something about doing. You take away the limits you've put on yourself and ask what would happen if you tried. I didn't know what success or failure would look like on the other side. I was just excited to learn something new.
And five years later, I got to sit on the couch and show my kids something their dad actually made. I got to tell them that Dad had an idea, did the work and finished it, and that trying new things is how you find out what you're capable of.
What are you sitting on?
Most of us aren't short on ideas. We're waiting for the right moment, or to feel more qualified, or for the fear to go away first. In my experience the fear doesn't leave first. It gets quieter once you start.
So what's the idea you've been sitting on? The business, the project, the conversation you keep putting off. What would happen if you gave it nine days?