Writing About Not Writing

Where’s Elvis? Where the hell is the king at?

Consumption is easy and fun. You can spend hours watching movies, reading books and articles or exploring your feeds on Twitter and Tumblr.

Creation is not so easy.  But it is more rewarding. And creators build value.

I spend too much time thinking about writing and not enough time actually doing it and I’ve been thinking about why this is.

The notion of wanting to create but not being able to holds a lot of people back.  Here are some reasons why people, myself included, don’t ever make it to creating.

Waiting For The Perfect Time

Lots of people wait for a perfect time.  They wait until the next project is done or they have a little more breathing room.  Tomorrow, three months, a year won’t be any different.  The perfect time to launch was yesterday.  Because in a year’s time, you’ll have learned a year’s worth of things about what it takes to be a creator.

Waiting For The Perfect Idea

Waiting for the perfect idea is the quickest way to kill creativity.

I believe what Sivers said: Ideas are just a multiplier of execution.  Ideas themselves aren’t rare, it’s the ability to stick with them long enough to turn them into something worthwhile that matters.

Launch with the best idea you have, the one you like the most or the one you are most curious about exploring.  Whether it succeeds or not is immaterial so long as you’re learning.  Reid Hoffman says – If you aren’t embarrassed by what you launch with, you waited too long to launch.

Fear

The fear of judgment and criticism can be paralysing.

What if people don’t like what I make? What if they disagree with my point of view or critique my style?

These anxieties hold a lot of people back.  But feedback, criticism and sunlight are all necessary for great ideas to evolve.  A single human brain sometimes isn’t the best place to see an idea to fruition.  You need the sharpening that comes with the friction of alternative points of view and the expansion that comes with other people’s perspective.

Unrealistic Reference Points

I look at the way Atul Gawande, Paul Graham and Ben Horowitz write.  I want to write like that.  When I try and fail, I get disheartened and stop.

That’s the mistake.  The right reference point isn’t external, it’s internal.  Did I create something that I like, that I believe in, that feels true to me?

Just because you’re not Thom Yorke doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write songs.

Polishing

It’s easy to do the wireframe, the mock-up, the one-page summary. What’s hard is the polishing, the refining, the perfecting, the amending and re-amending.

Pareto’s Principle, that it takes 20% of time to do 80% of the job, is true in the reverse.  It takes 80% of time to finish the last 20%. So many creations sit unfinished because to finish takes discipline and commitment and some grind-it-out boredom.

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This article’s first draft took 20 minutes.  It looked nothing like what I finished with.  Getting it right enough took a few hours.

It’s not the best thing I’ve written.  It might not even be very good.

But the point is, I stopped consuming and started creating. I created something. And so should you.