Why My Writing Sucks

If you read self help material, you may have come across the Ceramics Story from Art & Fear.

A professor breaks his class into 2 groups: one focused on quantity, one focused on quality.

The quantity group was to produce as many pots as they could - graded on total created.

The quality group needed to produce only 1 pot, but it had to be a perfect one - graded on the 1 pot.

In the end, all of the best pots were produced by the quantity group. Turned out that getting your hands dirty was a lot more effective at improving skill than theorizing.

The lesson: the most direct way to improvement is often repetition & iteration.

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Entrepreneurs know this too. Minimum viable products should be ugly. Reid Hoffman said it well: "If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late."

The idea is that feedback from reality is the best, fastest teacher.

This doesn't apply all the time. Sometimes it's better to measure twice & cut once.

I don't think writing isn't one of them.

And that is why my writing sucks. Some of these essays I've been tempted to delete. I don't want to be judged on them, I think I have much more to offer.

But I'm hitting publish with the belief that writing poorly is part of the process that leads to writing better.

Now I just need you to tell me why it sucks.