I cannot be held responsible for what I have done.

If you’re reading this, you’re looking at my blog. Welcome. I hate it here.

At time of writing, YouTuber Tom Scott recently left the platform with an announcement video on his channel. In another video, on his mistakes (of which there are shockingly few), he mentions hating his earlier works… which, I’ll admit, I found myself a little confused by. He is (or, perhaps, was) a prolific YouTuber with shockingly reliable and engaging content, and his earliest videos are no exception. Sure, they’re a little rough around the edges, but they’ve got charm. They’ve got spunk.

The other day, I found myself reading through an old blog post of mine, and I realized I, too, hate my earlier work. While others might see broader value in each piece, or at least the broader sentiment, I see every little flaw. Every little mistake that I’ve grown past. Every odd bit of phrasing tearing into me like nails on a chalkboard. That’s not to put my work on the level of Tom Scott, of course. I simply mean to say: if even he can’t look on his past creations without cringing, what hope do I have?

It comes from perfectionism. Worse yet, it’s a kind of perfectionism that damn near prevents me from writing anything at all. Every time I make the mistake of reading one of my own blog posts (usually because I just sent one to somebody), I have to resist the urge to take my entire blog down. I have to resist the urge to rewrite every post twenty times over until every sentence feels perfect—perfect rhythym, perfect phrasing, perfect style.

Yet, perfection is impossible. Most posts on this blog only survive the writing process because they were born in the fire of inspiration. For one reason or another, I suddenly found myself having a lot to say about a particular subject. If i was lucky, I’d get to my laptop in time to write it down, give it a quick proofread, and upload it before I changed my mind.

This blog continues to exist for multiple reasons, but the most important of which is that it exists as an exercise in getting things done. In finishing things—in letting them go. Every day I resist the urge to rewrite every word on this godforsaken site and I must keep resisting until I triumph. Because it is only through getting things done that we ever learn to really create great things. The greatest authors don’t sit around revising their work until it’s perfect—they keep writing until the next first draft comes out the gate worthy of commendation.

Maybe I’ll write a more in-depth post about it at some point, but I endeavor to subscribe to the cult of done (relevant video):

• There are three states: not knowing, doing, and done.
• Accept that everything is a draft, forever and always. It helps you get it done.
• There is no editing stage.
• Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you’re doing. So accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t, and do it.
• Banish procrastination.
• If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
• The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
• Once you’re done you can throw it away.
• Laugh at perfection, it’s boring. And it keeps you from being done.
• People without dirty hands are wrong—doing something makes you right.
• Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
• Destruction is a variant of done.
• If you have an idea and get it out there, that counts as a kind of done.
• Done is the engine of more.

There’s a lot to take in here, but I think the moral of the story here, is, at least for me: stop worrying about doing things right—it’s doing things that makes you right.

I like being right. So I suppose I’ll do things. I’ll toss these posts out into the wild, letting the ideas float out into the world, unsmothered by perfectionism.

And the moral of the story for the reader, here, is this: try not to take any of this too seriously. I can’t be held responsible for what I have done in fits of madness.