Pirates Lost At Sea

Next mini-book coming soon...

Dear Friend, Subscriber, and fellow Category Pirate,

We’re lost at sea—just wanted to let you know how we got here (and why being lost at sea isn’t always a bad thing).

"Is this legendary?" is one of our favorite questions. 

We've been working on our next "mini-book” for the last 15 days.

We thought we really had something.

Then, it became clear. What we had was a hot mess. 

• Over 50 hours of combined work.

• Absolutely breakthrough thinking.

• Countless sentences and paragraphs we thought were great.

• Expensive primary research.

We decided to ditch all of it.

Throwing out carefully crafted work that you’re passionate about, that you thought would spark a breakthrough for other people, and would make a meaningful difference is very painful. And the emotions you have around “sunk costs” can play tricks on your mind:

“How can we walk away from this? We’ve invested so much!"

Most of all, not delivering on time for your customers (in our case, our beloved Pirate readers) hurts.

What if customers get mad? Stop buying? Cancel their subscriptions?

But that’s what we chose to do.

2 weeks of work.

Countless hours of rewrites.

Until we finally paused, drank a bit of our own bourbon (we’ve never liked the cliché “eat our own dog food”), and asked ourselves:

Is this legendary?

It was not.

So, we threw all our work in the trash and started over.

Does that mean all our time and effort was wasted? Absolutely not.

Because starting over made us discover an even bigger, even more meaningful, more legendary idea—hiding in plain sight.

And that’s what we’re working on now.

Hang tight, Pirates.

We think we’ve found buried treasure—and we can’t wait to share it with you.

Arrrrrrr,

Category Pirates

Eddie Yoon

Nicolas Cole

Christopher Lochhead