The 6% Club offers a 100% money-back guarantee if you complete the program, publish 2 pieces, and feel that the program didn’t help. I joined the program wanting to start publishing on my personal website again, published 2 weeks in a row in September, then not again until months later. I’m not looking for a refund.

I found The 6% Club on a distracted workday after reading an article by Utsav Mamoria, one of the program’s founders/mentors. The 6% Club is designed to help you build a creative project and habit in just 8 weeks. I scheduled a 30 minute call with Utsav, who helped me decide that the program was a good fit for me: I was journaling and writing frequently but was afraid of and lacked the motivation to publish.

I spent the next several months telling myself that I should improve my website, write more often, or otherwise prepare to publish, but the program not starting for two months gave me a convenient excuse to procrastinate.

By the time the program started, the fire that led me to sign up for the program had dimmed, and though I’d known before, I was dreading staying up late for sessions that lasted until 2:30am because the program was based out of India.

The first session reinvigorated me. The community was inviting. Utsav and Chuck’s cats, The 6% Club’s “official” board directors, kept the session engaging. Utsav and Chuck’s instruction inspired me to believe that I could succeed.

The following sessions and take home assignments focused on refining my Big Idea. One of my hangups was that I thought no one would care about what I wanted to write about; it was validating to hear that my Big Idea should live at the intersection of the things that I was the best and most knowledgeable about.

But I was also beginning to feel uneasy. How would I truly understand my Big Idea before starting to publish? Some advice started to feel like it was coming too soon: we were looking at the trajectories of creators like MKBHD to see how they had started off unpolished and generic, but all I could see was how far there was to climb. Other program participants felt much further along than me, and because I’d declined to attend some peer-feedback sessions I was starting to feel like I no longer belonged.

By the 4th and final session I was starting to wonder if I had made a mistake. We received advice about storytelling, audiences, and some more tactical tips for particular mediums, but all I could think about was how I didn’t understand my audience yet, and didn’t think I’d be able to get better at writing until I was actually doing it.

The time to start publishing came. While I was on vacation, everyone made a commitment to start publishing on the schedule that they had chosen. As an accountability mechanism, they would post a link to their piece in the WhatsApp group.

I returned from vacation and made my commitment to publish a short piece once a week. We “graduated” before I’d published my first piece, which left me feeling even more like an imposter.

The next two weeks, I published a piece each week. The high I felt after publishing stuck with me throughout the entire week, even making work feel like it had color again. The third week, I spent longer writing than I had either previous week, having lapsed on my Kanji flashcards, I no longer felt authoritative enough to publish my article comparing the tools I’d used1.

I hoped that someone would come after me and tell me, you didn’t fulfill your posting commitment. A couple of weeks later I hoped they never would, and stopped feeling guilty for being part of the 94%.

In the space afforded by not writing, I decided that I should probably quit my job. Slowly, I was able to regain my motivation and resumed writing. In February, I left my job, focusing on deepening my friendships, and applied to Inkhaven.

For just $250 and a few late nights, The 6% Club rekindled my joy for creation. I’d say that helped me.

  1. WaniKani and jpdb.io. jpdb.io is better. Probably I’ll manage to publish this article during Inkhaven. ↩