Let’s talk about outcomes.
You know you should be publishing—creating new stuff for your audience so they’ll listen to you and buy your goods, support your cause, or just think you’re a smart cookie.
And that’s true, you should.
This puts pressure on us as content creators. We feel like we need to obsess over everything we make because we want people to like it.
But your job isn’t to make them like anything. Which is good, because that’s impossible.
I’ll never shut up about this: in life, you can control almost nothing. You’re especially powerless when it comes to the feelings and reactions of other people.
You don’t get to decide which at-bat is a strikeout and which one is a home run. In this context, you control exactly two things:
- How often you step up to the plate.
- How much effort you put into getting ready to step up to the plate so you don’t blow it too often.
That’s it. Everything else is out of your hands.
(Funnily enough, this is a liberating revelation because internalizing it lets you release a lot of the responsibility.)
So, you do have to march your ass up to the plate, regularly. Yes, it’s scary to hit “publish.” It gets easier after you’ve done it a few hundred times. Soon enough you’ll realize that nobody is nearly as concerned about what you do as you are.
And you have to prepare: build your knowledge, learn who you’re talking to, and practice the art of cranking out good content fast. This also becomes much easier over time.
(I’ve spent about eight minutes writing this if that’s any indication.)
Publish, publish, publish. Find a piece of wisdom among your storehouse of knowledge, wrap it in an interesting and entertaining story, and send it off into the world.
Then forget about it because it’s out of your hands now. How it lands is up to other people.