Being prolific AND producing high-quality work can be a tough bar to get over

In my days as a business journalist, my superpowers were turnaround speed and consistency. I generated comprehensive, double-digit articles every week and was ready to hit the ground running again every Monday morning.

I took pride in being known as prolific, particularly as my career pivoted toward freelance writing because that kind of reputation gets you word-of-mouth business. That’s important because one of the biggest challenges in being a freelancer is deciding who you are and how you’re going to market your services.

Painter Steve Keene is often called the most prolific painter in the world. In an October New Yorker profile, he estimated he has more than 300,000 paintings in circulation.

He told the reporter that he loves “the whole idea of doing 60 paintings a day and finishing them more than the idea of trying to make one that I think is perfect. The whole system is based on trying not to beat myself up.”

Keene sells his paintings on his website, usually for about $10 each but buyers don’t get to choose which pieces they’ll receive. They merely commit to a quantity.

A few months earlier, a different New Yorker writer profiled James Patterson, the world’s best-selling author. She also points out that the key to Patterson’s success is his productivity. He’s published 260 Times best sellers and sold more than 400 million copies. Publishers Weekly says Patterson is the best-selling author of the past 17 years, although not a single book has made the magazine’s list of the 150 best-selling books since 2004.

I remember a Wall Street Journal article a few years back that talked about Patterson’s dining-room table with outlines and drafts of a number of books that he had going at any given time. He churns out a bunch every year with the help of co-writers. He’s been criticized for a template approach to his writing with generic characters, short chapters, and unexciting prose.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with either man’s approach, and you can’t argue with success. “Perfect is the enemy of good,” Voltaire is credited with saying. Seth Godin regularly preaches on the importance of hitting the Publish button, while Nike urges all of us to “Just Do It.”

I decided to pivot my business model recently, to focus primarily on executive thought leadership and on helping large sales organizations explain how their companies solve their current and prospective customers’ pain points. Those two verticals are very related but it’s a different type of writing — a different approach that stresses quality over turnaround speed.

I turned down a project yesterday because I just didn’t want to write stories that would be labeled as “sponsored” (better known as advertiorials). They’re easy and fairly quick, but it’s not part of the brand I want to be building because those clients normally want to pound their chests rather than explain how they solve their customers’ pain points.

Few of us can be Steve Keene, James Patterson, or Seth Godin. It would be nice, but it’s a very high bar to be both prolific and turn out consistently great work. We each need to decide what we aspire to and then develop the skills, processes, and discipline we need to achieve that goal and also decide if we’re willing or able to do what it takes to achieve that goal.

And now, I turn it over to you.  How do you define yourself and how has it helped you decide where to market and whether you say no to clients who approach you?