Not hitting Publish yet

Category: Creative

Published: 12/05/2009 11:13 a.m.

Using the draft functionality is not really in my toolbox. I save drafts when they are one or two lines of an idea I'm not quite ready to flesh out. Other than that, I usually type what I want and then read it over once and hit publish. It's a great way to get content out there, but not necessarily a great way to get good content out there.

I don't really know how to write great content, but I imagine writing multiple drafts may have something to do with it. Putting this into practice is easy to do, but still tough to do right. I can write and re-write for months, but that still doesn't guarantee quality.

Quality takes practice and failure and getting back up. Michael Jordan made thousands of shots. But he took thousands more. Being really great takes years and it takes hours. Whether that's hours in the gym or hours working on a single draft, you have to put the time in.

I understand this, but I don't really know how to put it into practice. My old roommate Eric used to work at a golf course and he would tell me stories about it. One story I remember is about the guys who would come to the driving range everyday after work.These guys were there five days a week, neglecting their families or whatever else they had going on. They were there to get better, to put the hours in hitting a little white ball. They likely had aspirations of winning local tourneys or at least beating their regular 4-some.

But, Eric's story wasn't about practicing and becoming great and work ethic, etc. It was about doing it all wrong. He would say that many of these guys were practicing how to hit the ball wrong, and all they were doing was reinforcing these bad habits. They would hit bucket after bucket and never get any better.

Sometimes I think this is one of my biggest fears. I look back at some of the code I have written in the past and I am embarrassed. I feel bad for whoever is trying to work with it now. And then I look back at some of my blog posts and think I should have left them in the dust a long time ago.

Getting better and becoming great takes more than just practice. You have to practice the right way. And for internet stuff (web design, coding, blogging, twitter, etc.) there is rarely a single 'best practice'. Everybody (me included) has opinions about how to do things right. Even the standards people and the textbook-style methods can differ greatly.

In engineering, there may have been multiple ways to solve a problem, but they never resulted in a different right answer. This was one of the reasons I loved math and science and not really english. Two people can write completely different opinions of a book passage and both can be right/great/interesting. The same goes for design in engineering, which I was interested in but never great at.

When it comes to internet stuff, the range of good/bad and right/wrong is even wider. The common thread that I hear is that your audience determines what is good and bad. But at the same time, your content gains your audience. In some ways it seems like you can always gain an audience, but their size/interest/status may greatly differ based on your content.

This is even tougher when you don't have any audience at all, or a very limited one like I do.

In some ways having a small audience is great, because likely they are dedicated not because of what you are saying, but because you are writing it. It's like reading some crappy James Patterson novel because he wrote it. It's not about quality at that point; it is more about loyalty.

And perhaps a loyal audience is more valuable than one that knows good content. Or maybe a loyal audience is just one that agrees with your perspective of good. Then the challenge becomes writing things that I think are good. I think we are getting somewhere.

I am loyal to Merlin Mann, Apple, and XKCD to name a few. I am loyal to them because I think the things they make are fantastic and unique and of a very high quality. And from listening to them, I think they would agree in many ways.

From reading Merlin's stuff, he seems to think that he still produces some crap, but he wants to make stuff he is proud of. I can relate to this. I love the feeling of having a vision of something and then making it. I did this recently with my shared page, and it turned out just as I imagined it.

I use lots of Apple products because I think they are great. I believe that many of them are made because someone at Apple wanted to use something that wasn't invented yet. I'm sure the do market analysis and such, but I think they made the iPhone because they wanted a better mobile device.

And I love XKCD. The cartoons are hilarious. I am sure that Randall makes them because he thinks they are hilarious too. Hugh at Gapingvoid is a less sciency equivalent. Great cartoons because he thinks they are great.

From my perspective, I only see the things that these groups publish. There may be hundreds more cartoons or ipod prototypes or hilarious improv podcasts that I don't see because they aren't published. And that is because these people likely did not find them to be good enough.

So I would like to do the same for myself. If I don't like what I'm making, it's OK to throw it away. There is no real use in hitting publish just to do so.