i had a 400-word piece sitting in a google doc for three years.
not a big piece. not my magnum opus. just a thought about something i'd been noticing. the kind of thing you write in twenty minutes and then spend twenty days deciding if it's good enough to publish.
every morning i'd open the tab. change a word. close the tab.
i told myself i was editing.
elizabeth gilbert wrote in Big Magic that creative work has a shelf life. not the work itself.. the energy behind it. the thing that made you write it. she says it shows up, waits for you to act, and if you don't.. it leaves. finds someone else.
i think about that a lot. because that piece didn't change.
the words on day twenty were roughly the same words from day one.
but i changed around it.
day one it was a thought i wanted to share.
day five it "needed more work."
day twelve it was evidence that i'm not as good as i think i am.
day twenty it was shame sitting in a google doc.
same words. same font. same everything. but it felt like a completely different document.
the piece didn't change. you changed around it.
that's what creative self-doubt does. it doesn't kill the work. it buries it under you.
brené brown calls perfectionism a 20-ton shield in Daring Greatly. you carry it thinking it protects you from judgment.
it doesn't.
it just keeps you from being seen.
you're not editing. it’s more like a version of hiding.
the draft isn't getting better.
you're finding new ways to delay the moment someone reads it and has an opinion about you.
that's not overcoming perfectionism.
that's surrendering to it.
pressfield calls it Resistance. capital R. in The War of Art he says it fights hardest against the work that matters most to your soul.
which means..
the draft you can't publish? the one that makes your chest tight when you think about hitting send?
that's the one.
the fear isn't a warning. it's a compass.
but the other side is real too.
sometimes the draft IS bad. sometimes shipping creative work that isn't ready would just be noise.
so how do you know. how do you tell "this needs more time" from "i'm hiding."
honestly?
you can't. the fear feels identical either way.
the voice that says "not yet" sounds exactly the same whether it's protecting you or lying to you. there's no clean test. you just have to pick.
anne lamott said in Bird by Bird that almost all good writing starts as terrible first efforts. the draft is supposed to be bad. the expectation that it should arrive finished.. that's the disease.
and godin goes further in The Practice. shipping isn't what you do when you're ready.
shipping is how you get ready.
the act of putting it out there IS the practice. not the reward for completing the practice.
so every day that draft sits in your google doc, you're not getting closer to ready.
you're getting further from it.
i published the piece.
not because i figured out it was ready. not because the creative self-doubt lifted and i saw clearly.
i published it because i'd spent more time thinking about publishing it than i spent writing it.
that ratio felt wrong.
so i just.. did it. hit publish. regretted it immediately.
for about two seconds.
publish. close the tab. go make coffee.
and then.. nothing. a few people read it. someone messaged me. the catastrophe i'd rehearsed for three weeks didn't happen.
here's what i keep coming back to.
publishing is the only time you give yourself a chance to impact the world the way you imagined you would.
everything else is rehearsal. and rehearsal doesn't count.
the real danger isn't a bad post. the real danger is what happens when you don't ship. every draft you abandon teaches you that abandoning is the move.
every "not yet" becomes the default setting.
and gilbert's right.. the energy leaves. not just from the piece. from you.
one day you're someone who used to make things.
and you didn't notice because it happened one closed tab at a time.
that scares me more than a bad post ever could.
i still don't know when something is ready.
probably nobody does.
but here's what i figured out by accident.
"is this good enough" is the wrong question. it's not a threshold.
it's a trapdoor. you fall through it forever.
the question that actually works..
is this honest?
does it say something i believe?
would i say this out loud to someone sitting across from me?
that's the whole grading scale. three things.
if it passes those.. publish your work. close the tab.
if you've read it more than twice and haven't changed anything meaningful.. it's not a draft anymore. it's a hostage.
and at some point you have to decide what kind of person you are.
someone who ships.
or someone who edits in perpetuity.
i'm trying to be the first one.
most days i'm still the second.
so anyway, here’s someone saying ship it anyway.
f*ck it let it sail.
— riley
