Braindump 0: blogging strat

Meta:

I strayed from my original strategy with this blog. I need to correct course.

To understand where I’m coming from: I’m the worst perfectionist you’ve ever met. If I get it in my head that a piece of writing matters somehow, I will freeze up and it will take me an hour to write a paragraph.

Perfectionism is why every task takes me so long, why I take months to DM people on Twitter, why i fail coding interviews. It’s why I can’t start a conversation with a stranger; why people tell me that I speak infuriatingly slowly.

My original strategy for this blog was something like this:

  1. Write a few dozen blogposts purely to develop the habit of publishing regularly; no regard for content, its quality, or word count, at all.
  2. Write the next few dozen blogposts while seeking feedback, gradually improving each aspect of writing, maybe experimenting with outlines and structure.
  3. Write the next few dozen blogposts focusing on developing the ability to research and distill knowledge.

After about a 100 blogposts, I would have the ability to write a solid, if dull, basic blogpost on some topic of choice. Then I could focus on things like becoming more entertaining to read, or finding my “voice”.

But I made a big mistake.

I started off with a few blogposts in which I inadvertently fell into the pattern of trying to provide value for the reader. And I tweeted links to my posts, thinking that it would put pressure on me to keep publishing regularly.

Which it did, to some degree, but it also made people read my blogposts and tell me that they’re good. That’s the worst thing I could’ve heard! Now I have expectations weighing on me. I need to keep delivering to please the crowd!

Finally I sat down to write post #6 (criticizing the concept of “personality”) and I just didn’t know how to put it together.

So I have to reset. No more quality. I tweeted earlier that this blog is in the “pushing-the-garbage-out stage”—but this is not just about writing badly because I haven’t yet learned how to write well. I need to write badly. I need to be at peace with producing garbage in order to break through the curse of perfectionism.