Scan time: 2-3 minutes / Read time: 3-5 minutes
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Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
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🙋♀️ Paige’s first lesson that never gets finished
Paige is a marketing manager building a course for small bakeries on finding local customers.
The first lesson of her course has been half written for six weeks.
She opens the laptop, reads what she has, changes one word, and closes it again.
🧩 Her struggle:
She makes each evening’s job “finish the whole lesson,” so on a tired night she does nothing.
Her sister sends her a newsletter with the real story of a writer
who also started with long pieces that he only published now and then,
and whose thirty-day writing challenge more than ten thousand people have finished.
He had about five hundred followers when he started it.
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✍️ The tweet that turned into 10,000 writers
Dickie Bush started writing online in January 2020, and for nine months he did what most new writers do.
He wrote long blog posts, published them now and then, and almost nobody read them.
So he tried the opposite.
He challenged himself to write and publish one short piece every single day for thirty days.
Twenty-eight days in, he was still going, and he wanted other people doing it with him.
So in November 2020 he sat at his laptop and typed a question to the five hundred people who followed him on Twitter.
He called the short pieces screenshot essays: a few paragraphs, saved as a picture, posted where anyone can see it.
“Who would want to be a part of a group where every person writes 30 screenshot essays in 30 days?”
Six days later, fifty people were in a Slack channel with him, all writing one short piece a day.
Turns out “become a writer” is far too big a thing to start after work.
“Publish one short piece today” is not.
That Slack channel became Ship 30 for 30, a program Dickie runs with Nicolas Cole, a writer who joined him as co-founder.
The daily task has stayed tiny on purpose.
Each day, you write one essay of under 250 words.
You publish it in public, so it has to be finished, not polished forever.
You do that thirty days in a row.
Nine months after that first tweet, 1,800 people had gone through it.
More than 10,000 people have finished the thirty-day challenge so far.
None of them started with the big goal, “become a writer.”
Each of them started with a tiny one, “publish one short piece today.”
After thirty days of that, they were writers.
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🔥 The recipe
➡️ The Tiny First Step
Dickie made the daily task one short essay, published that day, and more than 10,000 people have gone through his program.
BJ Fogg, who studies habits at Stanford University, calls this Tiny Habits.
Make the task so small you would do it even on a day you don’t want to.
Then tie it to something you already do, so you never have to remember it.
Dickie’s version: after work, I publish one short piece.
He didn’t give up the big goal.
He just made each day’s task small enough to finish on a bad day.
So you stop waiting for a free evening when you feel ready to write the whole first issue.
That evening never comes.
Tomorrow morning, right after you pour your coffee, you write one sentence of the first issue.
One sentence a day, and the issue gets finished, even on the days you feel like doing nothing.
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🛠️ Paige’s turn
Now, back to Paige, whose first lesson for her bakery course has sat half written for six weeks.
That evening, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email, and tells it what she always does the minute she gets home.
Her AI sidekick doesn’t waste words:
Your job each evening is one sentence of the lesson, written right after you take off your shoes.
She takes off her shoes and writes one sentence.
Before bed, that one sentence has turned into a whole paragraph.
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🌅 Five weeks later
Paige hasn’t missed an evening since.
Some nights she writes one sentence, and some nights she writes a page.
The first lesson is finished, and she is halfway through the second.
The thing you keep putting off probably isn’t too hard for you.
It’s just too big to start after a long day.
Shrink each day’s task to one short piece you can finish on a bad day.
That’s it, my fellow outliers!
Yours ‘showing you that building a business is fun, not a drain’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
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🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below shrinks the thing you have been avoiding until it is too small to argue with.
🧰 What you’ll need
The thing you have been avoiding, and how long it has been sitting there
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. writing the first lesson of my course for bakery owners, since MarchWhat you tell yourself you need before you start, and what happens on a bad day
- e.g. a proper course outline and two clear hours, and on a bad day I do nothing at all and feel worse about itThings you already do every day without deciding
- e.g. make coffee at 6:40, take off my shoes when I get home, check email before bed
🚀 How to run it
Open your AI sidekick, ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever one you use.
Swap the three examples, the text inside the curly brackets, for your own, then run it. If your AI sidekick can already see your notes, you can run it as is.
🧪 Want to test it first? Run it without changing anything, and it will use the examples.
CONTEXT:
- Use my own material first. If you can see my drafts, my sent issues, or my subscriber dashboard, pull the real details from there instead of the examples below.
- If you know how I write, use my voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If you know who my readers are, write for them. Otherwise assume owners of small bakeries who want more local customers.
- If I have replaced the examples, use only mine. If an example is still there, fill it in from what you already know about me, and mark it as your assumption. If you don't know anything about me yet, use the example exactly as written.
- Every version must take under thirty seconds and must attach to something I already do without deciding. Do not tell me to want it more, schedule it better, or remove distractions.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
The thing I have been avoiding, and how long it has been sitting there:
{e.g. writing the first lesson of my course for bakery owners, since March}
What I tell myself I need before I start, and what happens on a genuinely bad day:
{e.g. a proper course outline and two clear hours, and on a bad day I do nothing at all and feel worse about it}
Things I already do every day without deciding:
{e.g. make coffee at 6:40, take off my shoes when I get home, check email before bed}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. The real size — what I am actually asking of myself right now, spelled out honestly.
2. The tiny version — the same thing shrunk to under thirty seconds, stated as an action.
3. The anchor — which of my existing automatic habits it attaches to, and the "after I X, I will Y" sentence.
4. The bad-day version — what still counts when everything has gone wrong, so the chain does not break.
5. What NOT to add — the plans and prerequisites to abandon, named, because they are what made it too big.
Then tell me the smallest possible thing I could do in the next ten minutes.