Welcome to V1LLAG3 Voice, the V13 Media Newsletter. Every Friday you’ll get our best music, entertainment, culture, and literature pieces: features, news, reviews, and more. C’est La V13.

Today is the first time I'm running my workshop on content creation for musicians, end-to-end, with real people in the room. (In fact it’s happening in 30 mins in THE V1LLAG3.)

I don't know if I'll make it all the way through. I don't know if half of what I've built is going to land or just sit there as noise. There's a version of me that wants to cancel, rebuild it for another month, come back fully formed.

That version is the reason most of my best ideas are in a graveyard.

The workshop I'm running today is built to teach artists how to ship. To stop incubating, stop perfecting, stop waiting for the draft they can finally be proud of. And here I am, hours before the demo, trying to talk myself out of running it because it isn't ready.

You see the joke.

I've spent the better part of a year building things designed to drag other people out of the exact hole I'm still standing in. The Foundations course. The workshop. The book I'd already redesign if I could. Every piece of it is some version of the same sentence: stop trying to emerge fully formed. That's not how it works.

I know this. I've said it on podcasts. I've written it in newsletters you're reading right now. And every Friday I sit down at this desk and try to use the time to finally make something rise to the caliber of my vision, instead of just getting the next ugly version out the door.

The lesson I keep building courses about is the one I keep failing in private.

Here's what I've started to notice though: the people who shipped before they were ready are the only ones who ever got to a version they were proud of. The polished thing you're picturing in your head isn't waiting at the end of more planning. It's waiting on the other side of the bad draft, the messy demo, the workshop you ran before you were "ready," the song you released before the mix was perfect.

You don't earn the good version by withholding the bad one. You earn it by shipping the bad one and learning what was actually wrong from how it’s received, instead of from the loop in your head.

If you've been holding something back this week because it isn't there yet, ask yourself honestly: is another month going to fix it, or is another month going to convince you to hold it another month?

Run the ugly version. Today.

That's how the good one finds its way to you.

Let's get into it.

🏚️ Inside THE V1LLAG3 the working room for indie artists. Four Classrooms. Four Wednesdays a month. $49/mo Founding 50 (38 spots, lifetime) · $79/mo Standard. → v13.net/villag3
🎯 Haven't taken THE STRESS TEST yet? 10 minutes. Free. Tells you what's actually killing your career. → v13.net/stress-test
🛠️ Next workshop: [BUILD YOUR VANGUARD — Content Machine Workshop, $149]. → v13.net/workshops

Love us…

…or leave us.

Delivered to you digitally with love & logic from the fine folks at:

MEDIA // MUSIC // PRESS // STORE // VIDEO