An Experiment in Scotch

I ran across this post today on Hacker News. The short syn­op­sis of the post is Sebas­t­ian explain­ing how he writes so much but it’s def­i­nitely worth read­ing the whole thing. I wanted to con­sider a cou­ple of thoughts he brings up. For the 4 or 5 peo­ple who still reg­u­larly check in here, it comes as no sur­prise that I haven’t been writ­ing much lately. There are a vari­ety of rea­sons for that but one of the key ones is the self-censoring critic that lives in my head and deems most things as unwor­thy of human con­sump­tion. I’ve been strug­gling with need to write good stuff all the time and what actu­ally hap­pens is noth­ing gets writ­ten. The prob­lem is, as Sebas­t­ian explains, if you want to make excel­lent stuff, you have to make a lot of crap.

This is not to say that if you make lots of crap, you’ll even­tu­ally make some­thing excel­lent. No mat­ter how long a sin­gle mon­key types, his chances of pro­duc­ing the entire works of Shake­speare are so minute as to be con­sid­ered impos­si­ble. You still need to be try­ing and improv­ing the crap that you pro­duce. But with­out that out­put, the chance of actu­ally pro­duc­ing any­thing worth con­sum­ing at all is very small.

I’ve fallen into the rut of expect­ing things to be very good. That per­fec­tion­ism has caused my out­put to dwin­dle to next to noth­ing. That’s got to stop. This hap­pens in my soft­ware life too, the need to do things that are good becomes over­pow­er­ing and causes me to do noth­ing at all. That need to be my best will almost always lead me to do noth­ing. Per­fect stands in the way of progress and all.

Of course, the prob­lem with all this is that if you’re writ­ing a blog and pro­duc­ing lots of con­tent, peo­ple are going to see the good and the bad. Before the Inter­net, writ­ers still pro­duced a lot but only their best stuff got pub­lished. Now, with the click of a but­ton, every­thing gets pub­lished. I’m not sure that’s a good or bad thing but of course, it con­tributes to the body of work that peo­ple have to sift through to find out if you con­stantly put out crap or actu­ally have good stuff occa­sion­ally. I’m lucky, most of the peo­ple who read my stuff think I’m a good writer. I’m always hum­bled and flat­tered by that. I’m also lucky that writ­ing comes eas­ier to me than to most peo­ple. I think that’s because in gen­eral, we are social ani­mals and peo­ple express them­selves socially with oth­ers. I’m much more com­fort­able sit­ting down and ham­mer­ing out my thoughts on paper (or in bits and bytes). I love long dis­cus­sions via email or let­ter though those things never hap­pen much in our busy world. So I guess I’m lucky.

This is a lot of self-indulgent navel gaz­ing but it seems to me that it’s applic­a­ble to any realm of cre­ativ­ity. You can’t become an excel­lent soft­ware devel­oper unless you pro­duce mas­sive bod­ies of soft­ware. You can’t become an excel­lent musi­cian unless you prac­tice fun­da­men­tals and basics for years. The cre­ative endeavor is almost alway backed by thou­sands of hours of what is essen­tially crap. When you stop pro­duc­ing crap, you stop being excel­lent as well.