#158 - Audience & Taste

The taste gap in creating anything is always going to be annoying to deal with, but I also think the mark of an artist is pushing through those fears and completing a draft of whatever they're making anyway. Because the only way to close a taste gap is to get better at your craft.

Writing on a blog is passive. It used to show up in a scroll on Google Reader (sorry, I know it's still painful for those of us who lost it) and exist on its own webpage that could be checked at leisure.

Email feels so much more aggressive. Especially because so many people have email notifications on and check things as soon as they hit the inbox.

Like, it's nice, but I think it's rare that the moment I send it is the exact right moment to read it. Everything feels urgent, so long things are Too Long instead of just being the experience they were meant to be.

Sending something to an inbox feels like a much larger flag to place in the sand. Doing this experiment for the past week, I've realized that I really do love writing but I've become somewhat ensnared in my own self-doubt that things aren't "important" enough to send. My slightly more nuanced understanding of it now is that casually publishing things allows me to put in whatever effort I want. Sending things out feels like they deserve more polish, and polishing is a sustained effort and therefore isn't something I want to just toss off because I'm having thoughts and feel like jotting them down.

Maybe that's taking agency away from an audience who simply doesn't have to click on the emails, but I also think it's way more freeing to write when that's not a pressure I'm applying. I might be misapplying it, but right now, the practice of writing is more important to me than making sure all of it is being Paid Attention To.

Improvement happens by doing. Not writing because I don't want to put the time or effort into editing and making it more cohesive is making me write less, so I have to eliminate that barrier.

I'm all about lowering the bar until I'm able to step over it.

I've got like five beliefs: we should get rid of wall street, housing & healthcare & internet & food security should be governmental guarantees for every citizen, abolishing the senate and getting rid of the "cap" on reps, not mixing peas and corn as a side-dish, and modifying whatever you're doing until it's easy enough to do it consistently.

At my job, we regularly recommend to people to write down their thoughts for one minute before meetings. People resist this very simple and quick suggestion so hard and I'm always so curious as to why. But I think part of it is the belief that it "can't be that easy". But how often do we slow down for one minute and give ourselves a chance to get our thoughts down? It's rare at best!

There's always going to be resistance, but the key is not letting shame or embarrassment of not having known something already stop you from learning it.

Just like sculpting is about chipping away the stone to reveal the statue, first drafts exist to be honed. But you have to write the first draft and not let your own standards stop you from simply inserting [TK figure out plot point here] or writing down the joke you know you'll have to improve later when you hit a snag.

I'm writing more, I'm thrilled about it. It doesn't have to be bigger than that. Knowing that I don't have to send these out but that they exist for me and anyone else who wants to read them is thrilling. Best of both worlds, even!

It doesn't have to be long or even a complete thought. It's good to create, it's good to publish, it's good to let things exist in imperfect forms.