Why you don't want to publish something
The things that inhibit us from putting our content out there.
Welcome to the first issue of Great Stuff! For this issue, I thought I’d share what inspired me to start this newsletter in the first place. These insights really get to the core of what inhibits people from putting their content out there, and I hope they inspire you to publish something of your own!
Here’s the stuff I’m talking about this week:
Consistency And The 10% Rule
On Not Overthinking, a podcast which I highly recommend, brothers Ali and Taimur Abdaal propose something that sounds radical but is actually pretty obvious: When it comes to creating content, you're doing fine as long as 10% of your audience loves what you're saying. They argue that content creation is all about catering to that 10%. If you try to appeal to everyone, people might appreciate your content more on average, but you risk losing the fans that would go knock on their neighbor’s door to tell him about what you’re doing. According to Ali, a YouTuber with 1m followers, consistency is key, and the more you put out, the more likely it is that you find your 10%.
The brothers also address a common hang-up, which is people feeling like their content needs to be very polished for it to be publishable. Ali suggests that this is due to a fear of being judged for putting out something crappy. This is even though we are rarely good judges of our own work; what we deem to be dull may prove useful for someone else. Another social fear is one that comes about through our own judgments. When we see someone else putting themselves out there by, say, playing the piano in public, we often recoil and think “What a show-off!” The assumption is that this person is trying to signal something or gain brownie points, even though it may be a genuine attempt to help others. By analogy, we think that this is how others will view us. But as the brothers put it, you just need to find your 10%. Besides, if you think you would be supportive of a friend putting themselves out there, your friends would probably be supportive of you as well.
To put all this another way, odds are you have something valuable to say, and you won’t know what that is until you’ve said lots of things in general.
Shitty First Drafts
My English professor recently shared a humorous essay called Shitty First Drafts by Anne Lamott. Before I spill the beans on this essay, let me touch on something that has long prevented me from starting a newsletter like this: perfectionism. Actually, no, not perfectionism—instead, the pursuit of perfection on the first try. Whenever I start writing something, I expect my first draft to be brimming with potential. Rather than focusing on putting all my ideas down, I spend a million hours thinking about the best way to phrase each idea. Usually, in the end, I get so frustrated that I abandon the project entirely. This is rather ironic because as mentioned in the section above, we rarely have any idea of what actually constitutes perfection when it comes to our own work.
Anne Lamott, a professional writer, is familiar with this phenomenon, and if you’ve ever tried your hand at writing, you probably are too. She evokes the feeling of dread that sets in when you’re continuously XXing out what you’ve written and eventually convince yourself that the whole endeavor is futile. To overcome it, she advocates for writing shitty first drafts: blobs of text that contain all your ideas, patched together like hideous little Frankenstein’s monsters. The basic premise is that only after putting down all your thoughts, no matter how shitty and embarrassing, can you actually begin to see how your ideas look on paper and figure out how to say them good.
Learning that professional writers don’t just sit at their machines and enter superhuman flow states has been pretty paradigm-shifting for me, and I’m trying to avoid XXing out what I’ve written while writing my first drafts. Indeed, a shitty first draft is what made this newsletter possible.
That wraps up the first issue. I hope you found it interesting. If it wasn’t, be sure to reply to this email and let me know what I can improve! If you’ve got a little more time, please fill out this anonymous survey.
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Loved reading this, I relate. Hard.
Fantastic newsletter! I really resonate with the feeling of frustration when writing but definitely feel like I can shift my perspective to learn to love the "shitty first drafts". Look forward to the next newsletter!