Do the thing anyway
This is a post about publishing in defiance of the part of your brain that would rather you didn’t. It is as much a message to myself as to anyone else.
If you are anything like me, there is a reasonable chance that you make things and write things, and that most of those things are sat on your laptop gathering dust. The gap between the things I’ve made and the things I’ve published is usually not about me thinking they are not good enough. Publishing involves a certain willingness to be perceived that I struggle with.
For some of us, this comes from lived experience. If you’ve been repeatedly penalised for how you naturally communicate, then your nervous system might have concluded that communication itself is a potential threat. The fact that a blog post is not a high stakes interaction doesn’t matter. The threat detection part of my brain learns a rule that it tries to apply everywhere, whether it fits or not.
Understanding this is helpful, but doesn’t make the feeling go away.
These are some of the things that I have found help me to “do the thing” anyway. They are not universal advice and YMMV.
Do the thing more
This is counterintuitive. For some reason, when I post infrequently, each one can feel like a bigger thing than it does when I write every day.
My model of how people might react has been built from worst-case scenario type experiences in environments that were hostile to my natural way of processing information. Posting regularly, in chosen spaces, helps my brain to recalibrate the threat model. Most of the time, nothing bad will happen. Nobody will remember most of what I write, not even me. Nobody might ever read the thing. Over time it can start to feel safer.
Read it once and spot the fear
These days I try to only let myself read what I’ve written once for typos etc, then hit publish, although I don’t always manage to stick to that.
The second, third and fourth passes are almost always driven more by anxiety than any thoughts about quality. I am not making my writing any better on the ninth read-through, I am looking for something else to worry might be misinterpreted. If that is what I am looking for, I will always find it. Language is ambiguous and you can almost always find a way that someone might read a sentence differently to what you intended. This will only encourage hedging and the watering down of arguments where none is needed. If you’ve ever spent half an hour rewording a two sentence message, you will know exactly what I’m talking about here.
When I find myself doing this, I try to ask myself if a reasonable person, reading in good faith, would understand what I meant. If yes, I should just publish the thing.
If I miss any errors or something is unclear, I can usually fix it after publishing. This typically doesn’t happen, because the same thing that stops me writing the thing, makes me never read it. Regardless, nobody is so interested in what I have to say that they are following along in real time, waiting to pounce with some sort of checklist.
There is a difference between conscientiousness - “let me quickly check for mistakes,” and hypervigilance - “let me read this a seventh time in case it could be misconstrued.” It helps to be able to tell them apart. When editing I try to ask myself which one is driving what I am doing. If it is the latter, I find it is helpful to acknowledge it without giving it a veto on whether I do the thing at all.
Over time, in the right spaces, the “what if someone thinks” voice can start to get a bit quieter.
Know that you will get it wrong sometimes
I will, at some point, write something that lands in a way that I didn’t intend. Someone will misunderstand me because I have phrased something clumsily or didn’t intuit something. I will share opinions that people strongly disagree with. This will happen because it happens to everyone who communicates. It is not evidence that I am bad at communicating. A decade of user support taught me that there is nothing that you can say or do that at least one person couldn’t find a way to be unhappy about!
When this happens, most people don’t interpret it as confirmation of some deep personal failing. They seem to be able to shrug, clarify, and then move on. It is fine for me to react that way too. For that to be possible, I have to accept in advance that imperfect communication is the price of my communicating at all.
It helps to remember that the consequences of getting most things slightly wrong are small. There are times where I will say or do something requiring genuine reflection and apology, but this will be obvious when it happens. There is no amount of editing that can reduce the risk to zero, and chasing zero would only keep me stuck.
There is a cost to not doing the thing
Every day that a useful tool stays on my SSD drive is a day that someone who might need it doesn’t know it exists. I build things because I know what it’s like to need them, but if they just sit there, the people who need them now can’t use them. The same goes for writing.
At some point, choosing not to ship the thing, or write the thing that helps people is itself a choice that carries consequences. None of it needs to be complete to be useful. A thing that’s 80% polished is already much better than what currently exists if what currently exists is nothing. If you are waiting for someone else to do the thing, you might be waiting forever.
This is the hardest one, as it can sometimes create guilt over not doing the thing, but when considered in the right way, I find it can act as a good motivator too.
tl;dr
You are allowed to sound like yourself. It is ok to be direct, technical, long winded, enthusiastic, dry or whatever else it is that you actually are. You don’t have to translate yourself all the time in every space, and certainly not in the ones that you create.
The people who respond to that well will be your people. Write in the way that makes sense to you, and the people who find that valuable will find it.
Do the thing. Do it again tomorrow.