Barf It Out, Then Clean It Up
Colin Marshall, on the heuristics he’s picked up in 2009. My favorites:
“Barf it out, then clean it up.” A friend quoted her journalism teacher as saying this, and I’ve since adopted it as a pithy reflection of the broader phenomenon that the sole path to non-suckage winds through the treacherous woods of suckage. I must therefore make peace with producing something sucky and then iterate that initial product until it achieves decency…
“What’s the hardest thing I can do?” Again, my hat tips to Paul Graham: “This is a good plan for life in general. If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you’re trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you’re even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind what’s the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it.”
I’m trying to live the first one by writing faster; by not re-writing endlessly, or telling myself I’ll come back and polish something later. Write it now, and give it to the world.
I need to remember that second one. I’m horribly lazy and would much rather sack out on the couch to last night’s Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson than actually work at producing something. Produce more, consume less.
Via Ben Casnocha
