Beneficial to infinity, or optimal to zero

Exploring thoughts in order to move conversations forward

I have written plenty on the Internet, and yet I struggle regularly with the idea that writing is the pursuit of optimal — everything must achieve the perfect tone and tenor on a topic not covered ad nauseam by someone else. Look no further than our post on engineers that give a damn.

Reading this short piece from Sahil Bloom, however, has helped my own struggle. Not immediately, mind you. I rolled his post around in my head for the last month before it manifested itself here. In short, he says that optimal is the mortal enemy of beneficial.

We spend so much mental energy thinking about what is optimal, and we beat ourselves up when we cannot find the time, energy or outright genius to do the optimal thing. And, consciously or not, we sacrifice the much smaller, much easier actions right in front of us that could still be beneficial. Small but beneficial actions compound with time.

So what? We have lots of ideas at Atypical. We have put virtually none of them to public paper, and today they move forward mostly in one-on-one conversations. Or they languish and die in physical or digital notepads. I’d like that to change.

How do I plan to make this work? Creative constraints. Write on one idea for no more than 60 minutes, and then hit publish. No exceptions. There will not be a specific cadence to write/ publish, because ideas do not emerge on a regular cadence. There will not be a word count minimum or maximum, because some ideas are worthy of more words than others. Each post will be published without edits, because edits require more time and mental overhead — or a focus on optimal. This is an honest exploration of ideas, and there will be flaws.

There is no faster way to kill a bad idea or accelerate a good idea than to share it.