7-40 Challenge | 6-22-2026

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I cut almost half of my first novel in editing. Scenes I loved. Lines I was proud of. Whole subplots I’d spent weeks building. Every cut made the book better.

This round, I did the same thing to my year.

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I started 2026 with a list of everything I wanted to build. Two novels became six books. A blog became a content machine. An AI idea became three competing products. A business, a course, a manifesto, a personal data model, a half-dozen story concepts. All of it good. All of it possible. None of it focused.

So I started cutting.

The Data Model book — cut. Three novel concepts I was excited about — pushed to next year. A product name I’d fallen in love with — killed when I found the trademark conflict. An entire AI course framing — scrapped and rebuilt twice. A round I wasn’t satisfied with — reviewed and reinvented.

Every one of those cuts stung a little. And every one of them made the year better.

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The things you cut aren’t failures. They’re the cost of focus. A story that tries to be everything is a story about nothing. A year that tries to do everything accomplishes nothing.

The hard part isn’t adding. Anyone can add. Adding feels like progress — more projects, more ideas, more plates spinning. The hard part is looking at something good and saying “not this, not now,” because you’ve decided what the story is actually about.

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My first novel got better when I stopped protecting the parts I loved and started serving the story. My year is getting better the same way.

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 34

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Seth Godin dropped nineteen points about marketing in the age of AI. Three of them stopped me cold.

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“Stop trying to be famous. The goal is not to get more famous. The goal is to get less famous and more trusted.”

I’ve spent most of this year building things. The volume has been relentless. But the question I keep dodging is whether the people I’m reaching actually trust me, or whether they’re just watching me build.

Those are different things. An audience watches. A community trusts. I don’t need more people watching. I need more people who’d notice if I stopped.

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“Stop trying to reach everyone. Start trying to deeply serve someone specific.”

A few weeks ago I wrote about looking for my Soho people — the small group of readers who’d grab my work and carry it forward. I’ve been thinking about it wrong. I’ve been looking outward for them when some of them are already here, reading this blog, following the Bible pictures, checking in on the challenge. I just haven’t asked them what they need.

Serving someone specific means knowing them well enough to build something they’d miss. Not something they’d scroll past — something they’d miss.

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“How do I become the kind of business that people would genuinely miss if it disappeared tomorrow? That answer is your entire marketing strategy.”

That’s the only question that matters. Not how do I get more attention. Not how do I go viral. Not how do I crack the algorithm. Would anyone miss this if it were gone?

I don’t know the answer yet. But I know it lives deeper with the people who are already here — not louder toward the ones who aren’t.

7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 30

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There’s a quote attributed to Blaise Pascal: “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”

Most people read that as a joke about editing. It’s not. It’s one of the truest things ever said about how real clarity works.

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The simple version of anything is never where you start. You start with the mess — every idea you have, every angle you can think of, every framework and connection and tangent your brain wants to chase. That’s the long letter. It’s necessary. You have to write it.

But the long letter is not the product. The long letter is the process.

The product is what’s left after you cut everything that doesn’t make Monday morning better for the person holding it. That takes longer than the mess did. It takes focus, honesty, and the willingness to throw away things you’re proud of because they don’t serve the person you’re building for.

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I’ve watched this play out in my own work this year. I cut nearly half my first novel in editing — not because the writing was bad, but because I was explaining things the story had already shown. Yesterday I wrote a closing line I loved — a declaration about what I was going to do next. The editorial pass cut it because the essay had already made the point. The line served me. It didn’t serve the reader.

I’ve been developing an AI education product for weeks. It kept growing — more frameworks, more depth, more layers. Then I asked myself what the simplest useful version looked like. The answer fit in one sentence. That is where I am headed.

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Simplicity isn’t where you start. It’s where you arrive after doing the hard work of going through everything else first. The short letter takes longer than the long one. But it’s the only one worth sending.