Quality decreasing, quantity increasing
More to come
One of the many reasons I haven’t written as much as I want to is because I don’t want to publish things that I don’t think are at least ‘good enough’. When I finish a draft and go to click the publish button I remember there are some people who will get this in their inbox and I don’t click because it’s probably not worth putting there.
Someone said to me once, several years ago now when I published something every day for a month “I opened my inbox and all I saw was your shit”. He said it in a loving way and he didn’t mean it was shit, he read quite a lot of them - I saw the analytics - and the effort it takes to select and ‘mark read’, ‘delete’, or unsubscribe is very small. And yet…
“Kill the part of you that cringes.”
Hank Green (probably someone else before that).
This is hard. I think it’s a riff on:
‘Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
The White Queen, Lewis Carroll.
And I think they both allude to the idea that you should just do the things you want to do, don’t worry about what other people might think or say about it, more than likely they won’t care, and if they do it doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter if you’re doing it for you anyway, because then if someone tries to dissuade you you can ignore them, it’s not for them.
It all reminds me of a really wonderful film ‘Coach Carter’ . I think I’ve written about that before though so won’t bother again, I’ll just put the clip at the end of this.
That said, that’s not really what I wanted to talk about. I’m not going to fill your inbox with shit. Until I kill the part of me that cringes I’m going to manage it. I’m going to post/publish a lot more, I’m going to try to write every day and if I stumble into something I think is worth sharing you’ll get it. But the quality is going to go down.
If you go to my website to read things you’ll notice most of what I’ll post will be barely edited streams of consciousness. If you get it in your inbox you can trust there’s been at least two rounds of revisions/editing, but not much more than that. I’m trying to lower the bar to entry and trying to do impossible things like writing more - for me.