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“Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable.”
Twyla Tharp
For years two brothers threw their best product in the trash. You’ve probably eaten it.
Nephi and Golden Grigg cut potatoes for frozen french fries in Oregon and each cut left slivers too small to sell. The slivers piled up and got hauled off as waste. In 1953 the brothers stopped throwing them out.
They chopped the slivers finer, mixed in flour and seasoning, pushed the mash through a row of holes and cut what came out into little cylinders. They called the result Tater Tots.
The scrap on the floor became the product.
Publishing a book was on my bucket list, the kind of thing you picture spending a year writing. Then I remembered the hundred principles I wrote five years earlier. I gathered them and hit publish. The book sat finished for five years while I pictured writing it.
I was building a new giveaway to grow my email list when I realized I already made one. A video that runs any business idea through eleven filters sits on YouTube with about fourteen thousand views and a page of its own. Put an email box in front of that framework and the giveaway is done. I nearly rebuilt from scratch what I only had to point at.
Nearly two hundred daily essays sit published on my site. Any one of them could be a giveaway. A stack of them could be another book.
The reflex is to make something new, always from scratch:
- a new giveaway
- a new book
- a new course
Meanwhile the work you already finished piles up unused, like sawdust on a workshop floor.
Your next giveaway, book, course, talk or template is probably already written. You just have to pick it up off the floor.
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What could you make from what you already have?
