Maximizing failure

why this is my objective for the rest of 2025

I have several unpublished essays sitting in my drafts. Products I built but never launched. Takes I never shared. I put real time and effort into these things, then let them die in private. Why? Because I wasn’t sure how people would react to it, what the feedback would be. So I kept perfecting it and perfecting it, until I eventually abandoned it to move on to the next thing.

Feedback (failure) is scary - it can be unpredictable, and it can really sting. Planning, on the other hand, gives you this sense of safety and certainty because you are in control of things. No surprises, it feels good, and it can feel like progress if you spend a lot of time doing this. Reality has a surprising amount of detail, and the outcome, more often than not, is not under your control.

Next time it’ll be different, I tell myself. Until next time comes around and the same thing happens more often than not. I’ve now come to decide that I will change this for good. But then the first instinct is….you guessed it right, to think of how I am going to change this, to plan for it. But the only way to change it is to get your reps in, to keep doing it until it becomes second nature, until failure becomes less scary. Which in my case means I should just do things.

So that’s what I am going to do. The next 6 months - I am going to write, create, and publish, and a lot of this is going to look incomplete, stupid, and all the other things my brain can think up to keep me from shipping it. But I’m going to ship, and keep doing it. More concretely, it means I’m going to write every week, and ship at least once a week.

Starting with this one.