Nerd Girl Thoughts

Several years ago, a neighbor kid kicked a football and shattered a small basement window. We were a family of six living on a teacher's salary at the time, so I boarded it up, thinking I'd get to it someday. The frame was rusted shut. I couldn't fix it.

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— Nathan Howe (@natehowe) August 27, 2021

I wasn’t entirely sure what (if anything) I wanted to bring to Lessons Learned week for Blaugust 2021, but then this tweet came across my timeline this morning, and it was like I got hit over the head with a giant lightbulb. Please excuse the mixed metaphor, but the takeaway here is huge as a blogger, especially as a hobbyist blogger (as opposed to one who is trying to make a revenue stream happen).

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of done.

It’s a funny sentence, in it’s own way, but I think it’s a conflict that just about every type of creative faces at some point. Everything you have ever done? Probably could have been done better. But how much better and what would it have cost you?

Sometimes, I have the barest glimmer of an idea, and I think, man, I need to ruminate on that. Or I just push it aside because I don’t trust my ability to make that idea into a compelling post. I think it’ll be too short, or worse, far too long. I have no graphics. I’m not ready to write it.

And that, friends, is why I have so many months where I post less than half a dozen times. I don’t want to put in the effort unless I think it’s going to be perfect.

But you know what? Perfect never happens, and done can be immensely satisfying.

I continue to be grateful to Belghast and the Blaugust community because revisiting blogging at the start of a blogging marathon meant that, if I wanted to win, I didn’t have time to get bogged down in the details. I didn’t spend months looking through layouts, trying to find something that was just right. I picked something that I didn’t find visually offensive, slapped a name on it, and got down to doing what I was there to do, which was writing.

And it’s stuck for over two years now. Sure, there have been fallow times, but I’ve – more or less – kept up with my oh-so-meager planned posts. I’ve tried a lot of things I otherwise wouldn’t have, and I’m getting words onto the screen and sending them out into the world.

It’s not perfect, and it hasn’t transitioned into other projects in the way I had hoped, but man, it feels good every time I hit publish on a new post.