Build your project graveyard

Creators and entrepreneurs should have 1 goal: to keep playing the game.

See we all want instant success and ideally we don’t want to work too hard for it. We see others building successful companies and living lifestyles we dream about.

But we’re reluctant to fail, especially in public.

Taking risks is demonised by society but by ‘playing it safe’ you never really begin playing.

As Derek Sivers says “The most valuable real estate in the world is the graveyard. There lie millions of half-written books, ideas never launched, and talents never developed. Most people die with everything still inside of them.”

To avoid taking your talents to the graveyard you need to build your own project graveyard.

Your project graveyard is the list of projects that you built, learned from, but ultimately stopped working on because they didn’t quite work.

All successful creators and entrepreneurs have a project graveyard but you typically don’t notice because of survivorship bias.

People don’t talk about everything that failed because, well it failed. Instead they focus on the things that are working, making it look like everyone else is instantly successful.

But take Pieter Levels for example, he currently does over $2m+ in revenue per year as a solo founder with a few contractors. If you follow Pieter on Twitter you’d see how well his companies like Nomadlist, Remoteok and Rebase are doing but you wouldn’t see the 70 other projects in his project graveyard because they have been laid to rest.

Your project graveyard is a badge of honour, it’s the school of entrepreneurship, where you learn the skills to make the next project a success.

Here’s my project graveyard, what does yours look like?