On the way home. It occurred to me at the last minute that the latest blogpost in doing for work might actually be quite a hit, because nobody’s really answered this question before. It might have further reaching implications than we realize.
Or it might also be completely worthless and amount to nothing. There is no way of actually knowing for sure until it’s actually out there. The point is, I spend way too much time worrying about how something will be received. This is a source of guilt, frustration and worry, and it is almost entirely unnecessary (beyond the bare minimum). I should instead simply put things out as quickly as possible and not second-guess myself so much. I over-prioritize a perfection that’s practically impossible to reach deliberately. It’s something that happens almost by accident after many, many sketches. After lots of shipping.
A large amount of my life’s struggle seems to be about detaching myself from outcomes and focusing on getting stuff done, even if the quality does not meet my standards. Do this often enough and regularly enough and you will surpass your own standards.
Lets take my own word vomits for example. This is post 90. Each post has a minimum of 1000 words, so we’re at least at 90,000 words. It’s probably closer to about 96,000 words. My goal is to reach 1,000 vomits, or 1,000,000 words. Why? I just feel like it. I want to see who I am at the end of it. I already know that I am capable of it. I’m a verbal firehose.
At what point do I expect any of it to be useful to people? I think I’ve had two good posts so far that stick in my mind- “I didn’t do well because I didn’t study”, and “productivity should be about lighting fires”. The previous post probably has a thousand or two thousand hits. The latter has almost twenty thousand hits. Okay, I posted it to HN, and I expected some response, but I wasn’t expecting front page. The whole thing was written in a matter of minutes (though you could say that I’ve spent years preparing, inside my head, over conversations with friends, etc. Preparation meets inspiration and momentarily overcomes self doubt. User then posts it onto a platform of opportunity. Boom, 20k hits. I didn’t think any of my vomits would get this much attention until I’m at least halfway through. Who knows what I’m going to dig up next? It gets exciting.
How to get 20k hits from hacker news: write a thousand words everyday and whatever greatly troubles you. When you feel like you’re on to something, share it. This may take about 90,000 words. And hundreds of thousands of non-directed writing before that.
I’m tempted to explore the idea of the bum in a short story or maybe comic. But that’s something I’ll do for pleasure. Maybe. I don’t want to overthink this, I just want to do whetever comes naturally. I’m very excited about the work I’m about to put out.
What am I going to do about the whole productivity thing? In a parallel universe I’d drop everything and start working on that app with the people who’ve kindly emailed me. But I don’t want to do that. My role in that moment was to put out that little nugget of insight that I was so blessed to receive. I have to keep doing that. I may or may not get into it. I don’t want to make any big promises. I’ll just take each moment as it comes.
I was off my phone for a couple of minutes while I was changing trains. I started thinking about what this blog should be. I always really liked the idea of scaffolding being visible- you can see how something came to be. You can see the ascent, rather than fall into the trap of thinking that it was wild luck.
The first thing I had was a website. I made it out of html when I was 9 or 10. It had an intro page with an animated gif and a hit counter. Click on the gif and you land on a page with two frames. The frame on the left functioned as the sidebar. I used a javascript embed to make it snow. The pages had jokes, links to game sites, animated gifs and a guestbook. I can’t remember what else was there but I took great pride in making it classy, stylish, elegant. I should search for it on those web archive sites. Wow, I found stuff. Let’s talk about that later
So it started as a site with my writing (bad fiction and poetry, I believe.) Then I started a blog on diary-x. A lot of my peers were blogging too at the time- it was a way of keeping in touch with your friends and publishing/presenting a self. During this time I think I mostly wrote about my day-to-day life. Sadly, years of my diary-x blog got wiped out, so I can’t read what I had written then. Then I started a livejournal and a wordpress simultaneously. Around this time I started getting interested in playing music, so several of my early wordpress blogs were about the local music scene- gig reviews and stuff like that. I’m not sure what the mechanisms were for sharing things like that back then. I think people posted the links on forums. This was somewhat moderately successful, but it was never really going to go anywhere. I wrote for Power of Pop for a while during that time. I’d also post heavily on soft.com.sg, where I’d also get into arguments about random topics that interested me. I learnt quite a bit about argument from the martial arts and video game forums on GameFAQs (I also wrote a couple of FAQs, lol).
At some point I started blogging about local political issues- stuff that bothered me in the news. I remember writing about some statistics in the newspapers and how they were presented in a way that was slanted (not outright misleading, but a little sorta misleading). I presented my commentary to the papers in a way that revealed that they might have an agenda, and editors edited it so that it lost its effect- it became something of a technical criticism with no particular meaning. I was bothered by this so I wrote about it online. I got quite a bit of attention for it. I’d keep writing about local politics and media. All of my blog’s top hitcounts come from breaking local political news. I got invited to meet the Prime Minister. I eventually got rather sick of local politics, though. It was part of why I left Facebook for a while. Too much venom, too much fighting for the sake of fighting, too many personal attacks, everything was getting really ugly. People do whatever makes them feel good. It’s all showboating.
During my National Service, I decided to try and make the most of my time. I started what I called The 90 Week Project- I was going to keep track of how I spent every week. I did this pretty well for about 35-40 weeks, but then I lost the notebook I was writing in. I was heartbroken. It felt like I had literally lost a part of my mind. And I couldn’t quite recover. I did blog a lot during that time, which helped me develop my voice. I also started a Facebook group which would go on to be quite something (in my opinion). But the 90 week project itself was ultimately a failure.
I tried retaking my A levels after I was done with my NS. I got distracted halfway through, and was never fully into it anyway, and I got mediocre results that pretty much mirrored my previous results. I learnt a few things about myself, but that overall project was a failure, too. I burnt several hundreds of dollars to pay for the exam fees, and it was time that I could’ve spent reading and writing instead. (It did give me an excuse to pretend like I was doing something, which kept my parents off my back.)
I ultimately got hired because of my blog. I don’t even have a resume, to this day. This blog is one of the best things in my life. I think I’m going to naturally segue this into becoming a procrastination/productivity type blog. Or maybe it’ll be a writing type blog. I have no idea. It’s gongi to be about whatever’s on my mind at the moment. I might start writing about tech. I might write about global politics. I don’t know. Whatever I think needs to be written.
I’ve been taking really long to get to this point- my life is really just a series of failures. Me being incompetent. But somehow I’m doing okay. Erm, I’ll end here. I wanted to make some sort of big point about how you can’t really predict what’s going to work, and you’re better off just exploring your curiosity, your compulsion, whatever drives you nuts, really dig into that. Dig into that.