There's a tension to writing online that I've been dealing with for a while.
I want to write good content - things that I'm proud of. It feels like everything I write should be things I can save and re-share with people in the future, things I'd like to shine a spotlight on. When I produce my best work, the feedback is usually pretty positive. That positivity feels good. Publishing anything less than my best would ruin it.
But a skill develops by doing it often. Angela Duckworth wrote in “Grit” about an experiment performed by a Photography class several years ago. The teacher split his students into two groups: one group would focus on taking the most perfect picture they possibly could that semester. They only needed to submit one. The other group would focus on taking as many pictures as possible. They were responsible for volume. At the end of the semester, the students in the latter group took vastly more photos, and produced vastly better content. It seems we improve with repetition1.
So that's the tension. Write as much as possible, ship little bits of garbage from time to time, and get the extra reps in? Or wait for that perfect picture to develop, and have little else to show for it?
A goal of mine for a while has been to publish something every week. I've never really come close to that. At the start of the year, I described my Substack as a place where I would release a new piece of writing every other Friday at 9am. This lasted for exactly two Fridays. I got busy. But through two months of unemployment, it’s getting harder and harder to lean into that excuse.
So for today, here’s a little bit of garbage2.
I wrote this in less than thirty minutes while sitting in bed just after midnight on a Sunday evening. It’s extremely far from my best work, but I suppose that’s the point. Every piece of content is one step closer to creating something exceptional. Thanks for browsing through the building blocks.
Repetition and feedback, that is. Perfect practice makes perfect.
Take this as a sign that you should ship some garbage, too.