The world needs more failures (the secret behind big ideas)

The only way to sharpen your thinking is by putting your projects into the world before they're ready.

Since 2018, I’ve published 256 essays on my website.

That’s about one per week, for five years. 

There’s no single post I can point to and say, “that’s where I learned the most,” but I know I would not have seen as much growth if my output was lower by a significant degree. Certain pieces stand out here and there, but I’m most proud of my consistency — that I tried really hard for a long time even though I had no idea what would happen.

Before that, I wrote in a journal for several years. I scribbled privately to myself under the impression I was making strides as a writer. Maybe I was, but it wasn’t until I launched my blog that my writing took off. 

Publicizing my efforts sharpened my skills and taught me how difficult it is to make progress in a vacuum.

If you practiced, say, violin, computer programming, or photography in an empty room with no windows or doors, you would quickly maximize your potential. In this scenario, progress is possible, but finite. You’d have no idea how proficient you are, and you wouldn’t be able to gauge your own limitations. 

To do or create anything of quality, you not only have to be comfortable producing an enormous amount of inadequate work, but you have to be willing to do so in public. It’s other people who let us know whether we can actually do what we think we can do. 

It isn’t controversial to say your first attempt at something will not resemble someone else’s final product. Most ideas are short-lived, and few survive contact with reality. The bigger the idea, the smaller the chance it works as expected. 

In theory, then, fears of not being good enough should be ruled out. Yet so many people hesitate to subject their early work to public scrutiny. If you instead choose to plug away in private, all you can do is guess at what direction to point your efforts. 

When the goal is creating something to compete in the open market, guessing is rarely good enough.

I could see someone making a case that it’s a good thing most people are too intimidated to share their early work. It creates a favorable demand curve for those who do have this ambition — the more difficult something is to do, the fewer people will do it. 

The downside, however, is that society at large produces a smaller number of good ideas, which is bad for everyone. It saddens me to think how many people let fear prevent them from writing books or starting companies. 

In any case, I find great reassurance knowing persistence and hard work have long tails and high upside. Stick with a craft long enough and no one besides you will remember the crappy early work you put out. 

I wrote about this in a separate essay last month:

With a long enough time horizon, it actually doesn’t matter how good your work is on a given day. Being the best at anything mostly comes down to outlasting everyone else. The projects that become moonshots are those with creators who were able to forge past being unimpressive.

There’s an interesting personality component here, too. If you share a lot of lukewarm ideas and consistently build projects that don’t work, people will still see that you are enthusiastic, earnest, and not afraid to hustle. 

Especially when you’re younger, being known for those traits is at least as important as the work you actually produce. 

Improvement happens in aggregate, over the course of a body of work. Knowledge grows so incrementally you can’t see it change. It’s like watching grass grow. Even when it looks like nothing’s happening, something is (as long as you're taking action). 

All this leads me to believe producing good work has a lot to do with getting over yourself. Put your ideas in public earlier than what feels comfortable. Iterate quickly. Be okay with incomplete and embarrassing projects. You’ll be blind to most of the bugs until other people point them out. 

Early work is never good, but persistence has a long tail. The world doesn’t just need new ideas — it needs people who are willing to be wrong in front of everyone else.

Thank you to Eitan Miller for reading a draft of this post.