Turn Up the Volume

A reader of my blog asked me today if I ever feel like something I’ve written isn’t good. Clearly I answered “No, I have 100% confidence in every single word of every single post; this blog will eventually displace Emerson and Shakespeare together in the annals of human wisdom.”

Hahaha haaaaaaaa. No way. I think 40% of what I write, at least, is hot trash.

But that’s okay! Because it used to be 80%. Plus, there’s a big benefit to committing to producing content every day – it doesn’t all have to be gold.

See, when you write a lot, you lessen the weight that any single piece has to carry as a representation of who you are. If one of my posts is less than stellar, that’s not going to make me a bad writer or not have anything worthwhile to say. If any one piece doesn’t appeal to you, there are hundreds of others if you’re interested.

That also means I can test ideas more freely. Because I don’t operate in a framework where every post has to be an absolute home run, I can feel free to speak my mind. Ideas strike me and I like to explore them. Exploring them is how I discover if they’re great or not, and this blog is my means of that exploration. That means naturally some of my thoughts will be incomplete or misguided or flat-out wrong.

And often not the ones I expect! Sometimes I start a post and genuinely expect that it won’t be very good, but I’m committed to writing anyway. And then that post will turn out to be one of the better ones. That’s happened more than once.

Being nervous about writing because you aren’t confident in it yet is looking at the skill in reverse. Practicing something is how you get good at it; you can’t get good before you practice. If you’re not good at something, do it all the time – turn up the volume.