One of my favourite BBC shows is the arty farty Fake or Fortune.

The show is like a cross between Indiana Jones and the Antiques Roadshow.

My kind of TV!

I remember downloading a few episodes to my iPad before a flight to New York over 10 years ago. So I’ve been a diehard fan of the show for at least a decade, possibly longer.

But even though I’ve been watching for a heck of a long time, when it comes to paintings, I still know diddly squat.

So I sit bemused as the arty experts examine a potential masterpiece and wax lyrical about the deftness of the brushstrokes, the interplay of the colours, how the artist has used light & shade, how they’ve captured movement, the use of negative space and the hidden symbolism of a potato in the bottom left corner of the canvas.

To me, they’re perfectly nice paintings.

They’d look great on the wall of my daily email laboratory, deep within the battlements of Fort Grundy.

But the arty experts can see details, techniques and meanings which I can’t see. 

Having said all that, I do wonder.

I’m sure there are times when a potato in a painting DOES have a deep and significant meaning. I guess a humble potato could serve as a quiet reminder of basic human needs. Maybe a potato could hint at global exploration and the influx of new ideas & resources.

On the other hand, perhaps it doesn’t.

Call me crazy, but maybe (just maybe!) an artist decides to paint a potato for no other reason than he or she decides to paint a potato. 

Of course, we’re all pre-programmed to look for meanings in our lives. It was safer for our ancestors to assume rustling in the bushes was a predator rather than shrug it off, then get clobbered by a hungry sabre-tooth tiger.

But not everything in life has a meaning behind it.

An example:

Over the last few months, I’ve cranked up my focus on growing this newsletter.

And it’s working. My reader-base has more than tripled.

One of my biggest wins came via author and creator Paul Millerd. It’s not every day you write a book so successful that you get offered a $200k publishing deal and turn the deal down. But Paul did just that with The Pathless Path. He’s clearly playing his own game and this is what makes Paul’s writing so compelling.

But I digress.

In October last year, Paul published my “Back to Work” guest post in his newsletter. He also published it on his Substack and on his website. Altogether, that post snagged me over 200 new readers (I think it was closer to 210 in the end) and it still generates a steady flow of new readers today.

(hi there if you joined via Paul!)

Thing is, I started writing that guest post about a year ago.

Then for some reason I stopped. A few months went by where the guest post stayed on my desktop as a draft.

Did this hiatus mean I was scared of putting my name out there? Was my hesitation a sign of some unresolved inner conflict? Did I fear being criticised following some forgotten childhood trauma?

I could’ve spent hours thinking about all the possible reasons why I stopped working on the guest post.

Some people literally waste years trying to figure out stuff like this.

But with the benefit of hindsight I can see the only reason I didn’t write the guest post sooner was because I didn’t write the post sooner.

That’s it.

Nothing to decode, dissect or analyse. No grand narrative, profound meaning or emotional subplot.

Just me not writing the post until I wrote the post and an almost hassle-free process which paid off nicely when I did.

Funnily enough, I’m in a similar position now with my Kindle book, The Happy Employee (or should that be The Employhappee?). It's been sitting as a nearly-there draft on my desktop for a few months.

But it’s good to know nothing’s stopping me finishing the book.

All I need to do is finish the book.

Anyway, we’ve come a long way from potatoes. 

Yet the idea is exactly the same and worth tucking away until the time is right.

While I’m on the subject of growing my newsletter:

If you have an audience who might be interested in the stuff I write about (personal development, finding a freer relationship with work and life at Fort Grundy) and you’d be up for plugging my daily email wares to your audience, hit reply and let’s chat.

Lots of ways we could go about it and I’m very open to any idea that leads to a win/win. 

I’ve got plenty of ideas too.

But it all starts with hitting reply.

Even if you think there could be something here but you have a bunch of reasons why it probably won’t work, don’t overthink it.

Hit reply and we’ll take it from there.