The universe has a cute way of reminding you to do something. I rotated this thing that stores assorted stationary items and I saw this sticker… and the dust.
The Ship It Journal: Or, How to Outrun the Demon in Your Drafts Folder
Alright. Settle in. Coffee’s burnt, brain’s buzzing, and I’m looking at my desk. On it, there’s a graveyard. Not a spooky one. A sad one. A pile of half-finished notebooks, each one a monument to a great start and a pathetic fade-out. The first five pages are genius, furious, inspired scrawl. Then page six has a coffee ring. Page seven has a grocery list. Page eight is blank. Forever.
We’ve all got that graveyard. The half-written novel in a drawer. The series of paintings where you nailed the first one and then… evaporated. The podcast idea that’s just a title and seven hours of overthinking microphone quality.
Our creative lives are defined not by the ideas we have, but by the ideas we finish. The ones we actually put on a boat and push out into the terrifying, indifferent sea. We’re not idea people. We’re shippers. Or, at least, we’re supposed to be.
Enter this thing. This little, simple, almost insultingly straightforward artifact: Seth Godin’s “The Ship It Journal.” I know. Seth Godin. The guy with the bald head and the quiet, relentless optimism about human potential. The anti-me. It feels like something a productivity guru would sell you. And part of me wanted to hate it. I wanted to sneer at its simplicity. Call it a glorified to-do list.
But here’s the thing I realized, pacing in the garage, avoiding my own half-finished rants: It’s not a journal. It’s an exorcism.
It’s a structured ritual for beating the living hell out of your most persistent creative demon: The Resistance. The fear. The lizard brain that would rather have you reorganize your bookshelves by color than actually finish the thing that matters.
So let’s break it down. Why should you, a suspicious, self-sabotaging, overthinking creative, even consider this thing?
It’s Not About Feeling Inspired. It’s About Building a Coffin for Your Excuses.
The Journal is brutally simple.
This isn’t “Dear Diary, today I gazed upon the muse and felt a profound stirring.” This is an after-action report from the trenches of your own work. It forces you to confront, in ink, the tangible evidence of what it will take to ship whatever you are working on.
The benefit? It makes the invisible, visible. You can’t lie to the page.
It Redefines “Work” from “Thinking About It” to “Doing It.”
For artists, our work is often amorphous. “I’m working on my style.” “I’m researching.” “I’m in the brainstorming phase.” Great. That can be code for “I’m scrolling and calling it work.”
Shipping is concrete. It’s a PDF sent to an editor. It’s a finished painting signed and varnished. It’s a podcast episode uploaded and scheduled. It’s a chapter emailed to your writing group. It’s a discrete, completed unit of creative output.
The benefit? It trains your brain to value completion over contemplation. You start to structure your days not around the fuzzy goal of “work on my project,” but around the specific, nail-it-shut goal of “ship the vocal track” or “ship the revised first act.” You become an engineer of finished work, not a philosopher of potential work.
Look, we’re all unreliable narrators of our own lives, especially to ourselves. We make grand plans on Sunday night and by Tuesday we’re convinced the plan was stupid and we should watch a documentary about deep-sea volcanoes instead.
This journal is a contract. You don’t break a contract with a faceless corporation lightly, and you start to feel the same way about breaking it with yourself. Facing those empty lines every day creates a gentle, persistent accountability. It’s not Seth Godin judging you. It’s you, from yesterday, expecting a report. It’s future-you, flipping back through this artifact, needing to see the thread that led to the finished work.
The benefit? Momentum. Creativity is a momentum game. This journal is the logbook of that momentum. Day by day, ship by ship, fail by fail, you build velocity. You stop being a person with a dream and start being a person with a trail of evidence. A shipper.
So, should you get it?
If you’re content with your graveyard of half-finished ideas, with the phantom potential of all your unwritten, unpainted, unrecorded brilliance… then no. Absolutely not. It’ll just piss you off.
But if you’re tired of your own excuses. If you’re sick of the gap between the creator you know you could be and the one who’s currently staring at a screen, paralyzed by the infinite possibilities of not starting… then yeah.
Get the journal. It’s free, because Seth is a nice guy. Don’t think of it as self-help. Think of it as a wrench. A tool for prying your most important work out of your own tangled, fearful psyche and onto a boat. And then push that boat, with all its flaws and its weird, beautiful cargo, out into the water.
Ship it. Or keep talking about it. The cursor is still blinking. It’s waiting.
Alright. I gotta go. I have to log what I shipped today. And it’s this. This rant. So, technically… I’m done. Except for the dusting.
Mic drop, but gently, because it’s expensive.
The Ship It Journal can be found here.
And look, if you want more of this… this specific flavor of anxious, caffeinated encouragement-slash-dread? You can subscribe to this blog. I’ll let you know when I post. No spam. I don’t have the energy for spam. I barely have the energy to write the posts. It’ll just be a notification, you’ll sigh, maybe read it a week later when you’re procrastinating. It’s fine. We’re all fine.
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