I haven’t written for a while. My excuse is that I’ve been working on getting patent protection for an idea I’ve been working on -- I wanted to play it safe and hold off on writing about it publicly until I got that.
But I have noticed that without the accountability of periodic check-ins, my progress has stalled a bit. That was, after all, the original intention of this newsletter: a small thing to show friends and family that I wasn’t just screwing around.
As time has gone on, and more people have subscribed, my posts have gotten less and less frequent. I said to myself, “It’s allllll cooooool maaaan. It’s part of your creative journey maaaaan.” I thought I was giving myself more freedom to be creative by not sticking to a regular post schedule. But in reality, the more people subscribed, the less comfortable I was with my writing.
I felt like each post I wrote had to be something special in order to justify sending it to already overflowing inboxes. So instead of a schedule constraint, I put a quality constraint on myself that was even harder to achieve.
Every once in a while, I write something that just clicks -- like that post on safety factors -- which becomes the new bar for me to clear. “If someone subscribed after reading this, anything less expansive / informative / interesting is going to be a disappointment.” That’s a difficult proposition.
The only way I’ve gotten to this level of writing is by writing. If I don’t write because I’m afraid to put out low quality stuff, I’m not going to get any better.
So from now on I’m going to post weekly-ish (fully committing, aren’t I?). I’ll probably still occasionally write about those bigger picture ideas when te inspiration strikes, but for now, I’m treating this newsletter as I treated it originally -- as a build notebook, with all of the dead ends, u-turns, and general messiness that that entails.
Thank you for reading.
Surjan
Paraphrasing Paul Graham: we don't write when we have ideas, we get ideas when we write.