Overcoming my perfectionism: a week of fast publishing
I’ve suffered from perfectionism since childhood. I would start something, stop, and do it over because I didn’t like the way it looked. I would painstakingly perfect my handwriting on my homework assignments which took way too long. One thing I learned quickly by middle school is perfectionism can be crippling. Perfectionists start many things and don’t finish them. My mom can testify I have a room full of oil painting canvases that I started painting but never finished.
Once I started at Facebook, I learned the motto “Done is better than Perfect.” That saved my life. Good enough is better than perfect especially in tech.
My mentor and friend Susan Danzinger encouraged me to do an experiment: publish one post a day in the morning for a week. This sounded daunting. Once I started publishing on Medium and began amassing followers, I felt like I had to perfect my Medium posts even more to meet the high quality bar. As a result, I started to write and publish less. Like Instagram and Facebook, Medium had created a pressurized sharing environment once the quality bar kept rising.
How do we get people to share more when they feel like their content isn’t good enough? You create safe spaces for them to share. Tumblr is my safe space. Because it doesn’t have the dopamine-drip-like-feedback loop, I am free to share what I want without worrying about not getting enough likes. I can experiment however I want, get early feedback from blog posts on Twitter (they should really try to productize those insights for content creators), and then pick the best posts to redistribute on LinkedIn and Medium. Coming to the end of the week, I’ve learned some things:
1. I’m a super fast writer. I can usually bang out a blog post in 30 - 45 mins. Getting into the writing zone is the hard part. I’ve had to wake up earlier in the morning around 7am to publish something by 8am. I started every morning with coffee and Tumblr :)
2. People engage with content you write on the fly. I thought my most well-crafted blog post about online dating would be well received. Nope, it was the post about JOMO (#2) and data vs gut (#1)–both written on the fly–that got the most positive reception and engagement. People resonate with your authentic voice and less on polish, which helps me be less of a perfectionist. It’s less about the technical craft of your writing and more about the voice.
3. Content creators are agnostic to the platform. We want to go where our readers are. The quality of the publishing tools don’t matter that much. What matters is distribution. Benedict Evans wrote about this. Tumblr follows more like a Twitter feed model in real time whereas Medium like Buzzfeed with a rebubbling model based on engagement and shares. 4. Would I do this again? Probably not. I would change the frequency and publish on a weekly basis. I found the actual writing process to not be hard but carving out the time in the morning, not working out or meditating instead to be hard. I got increasingly more fatigued by the end of the week. I think I’m going to continue trying out new blog ideas on Tumblr, find what sticks, and then repost elsewhere. My Medium has 4K followers and I have 17K followers on LinkedIn so other publishing platforms serve better for distribution.
5. “The difference between a professional writer and an amateur writer is 45 mins a day.” This was something my neighbor Claire told me in SF. She had worked at Penguin Publishing as an editor for a couple years. I never meant to be a writer. It’s funny how writing found me, I didn’t find it. Now I just can’t quit writing and dream of publishing my own book one day.
This week-long experiment has been worthwhile. I found out that I’m a fast writer which is a good thing. Fast-publishing helped me overcome my web perfectionism. I just need to carve out time to write. A little writing every day builds momentum and I can feel the muscle in my brain growing stronger day by day. Thank you to all my coworkers at Tumblr who has been super supportive of my writing and dogfooding our own product!
Best,
–bo
http://tinyletter.com/bosefina