On posting without further thought

At some point, anyone who is interested in self improvement and/or art hears the parable of the pottery class and how quality emerges from numbers rather than a single attempt at perfection. Or if you are interested in digging into the source material, you'll find that it's really about the photographers and the number of photos taken.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's the passage from Atomic Habits:

ON THE FIRST day of class, Jerry Uelsmann, a professor at the University of Florida, divided his film photography students into two groups.

Everyone on the left side of the classroom, he explained, would be in the “quantity” group. They would be graded solely on the amount of work they produced. On the final day of class, he would tally the number of photos submitted by each student. One hundred photos would rate an A, ninety photos a B, eighty photos a C, and so on.

Meanwhile, everyone on the right side of the room would be in the “quality” group. They would be graded only on the excellence of their work. They would only need to produce one photo during the semester, but to get an A, it had to be a nearly perfect image.

At the end of the term, he was surprised to find that all the best photos were produced by the quantity group. During the semester, these students were busy taking photos, experimenting with composition and lighting, testing out various methods in the darkroom, and learning from their mistakes. In the process of creating hundreds of photos, they honed their skills. Meanwhile, the quality group sat around speculating about perfection. In the end, they had little to show for their efforts other than unverified theories and one mediocre photo.

If you want to read more about the bit about the two different versions of the parable, I shall point you to the source material.

The point is, I realized I could apply this to how I approach blogging. I went through some of my old posts around the time that I stopped blogging. And one tiny piece struck me from the post titled Coming out of a hole:

I needed a break from something. I took a break from blogging regularly. I didn't want to go through the motions of finalizing my blog in the night anymore.

"I didn't want to go through the motions of finalizing my blog in the night anymore".

I didn't realize it at that time. I had quietly built up a practice that was brittle towards any kind of life disruption and one that would hold me back from just writing and publishing as much as I want to. In fact, that's exactly what has happened as the past year or so has turned into an absolutely wild ride which involved a SOC 2 audit, multiple data protection assessments, and building and moving into a house while the landlord of our existing rental breathed fire down our backs.

There was no time for finalizing. And as a result, there was no time given to publish.

It's not like I didn't write either. At this moment, I have countless "Links and Notes" that I haven't published. I have at least 35 drafts written out and many more ideas scribbled and squirrelled into throwaway notes. The problem for me was not writing. The problem for me was polishing to publish.

If I squeezed my timeline down to 24 hours and applied the parable of the photographers to myself, I was trying to be the student who would publish the single perfect picture in a day. And because I didn't have a teacher I had to submit any writing to, I just went on to the next day, and the next. And eventually the writing just sat in a corner waiting to see the light of the day. Instead of this unfortunate habit, I should have been going all in on trying to be the person who would publish as much as they could whenever they could.

Of course, given obvious time constraints, I suspect I still could likely publish only once a day and that also is probably what makes sense. But the approach to taking the final step to publishing has to be one without further thought. I'll write it. I'll read it for obvious typos. I'll sigh at the issues I see glaring at me. And I'll accept that it's better to learn and apply it to the next time I write instead of trying to placate the demons of good writing in that moment.

This isn't a comeback post. This is just me trying to motivate myself to write freely, publish without further thought, and then learn and get better with the immediate next try.

I want a blog full of my words. Not spaces from where I tried to do better and ended up with nothing instead.

This blog doesn't have a comment box. But I'd love to hear any thoughts y'all might have. Send them to [email protected]

Posted on June 16 2025 by Adnan Issadeen