Pressing Publish

The Goal

I’ve heard that everything I want is just behind the door labeled “Publish”. A reputation for doing cool things. My name coming up when people talk about tackling hard problems.

The money that comes with it doesn’t hurt either.

The Problem

Putting yourself out there is hard. It’s harder when your self-identity is wrapped up with being good at things. The internet is filled with awesome people doing amazing things, and it’s easy to look out there and decide you don’t measure up. Those people started ages ago. They learned and grew, and now they’re doing great things.

Naturally you don’t get to compare who you are now to who they were then.

”If you never allow yourself to be bad at something, you’ll never be good at it”

You know what isn’t hard?

Investigating the right camera and audio setup for streaming.

Polishing that library you’re going to open source.

Reviewing that draft article one more time.

Waiting until it’s perfect. Worthy. Then you’ll publish it. You just need a little more time. Even better, you can say it doesn’t meet your high standards, and you get to feel good because you’re working on it.

The Answer

I was talking with a friend of mine who was lamenting that he never had time to work on an app he’s been building. I mentioned that he should eat a tomato as punishment next week if he still hasn’t made progress. Channel some Atomic Habits, right? Make the bad things painful. He recoiled, and admitted he’d have 100% goal compliance if those were the stakes.

If it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.

Every Friday I’m going put something here that I’ve done that week. Or I’ll post a video eating a cantaloupe.

And I really, really hate cantaloupe.