The merits of mediocrity
*EDIT: I hate this post, but I'm gonna leave it up for posterity's sake. If you're gonna read it, please also read my response, A lighthouse of competence in a sea of mediocrity
I was just talking to my friend Dakota, and how we feel like there are certain things we want to have on our blogs as "disclaimers" of sorts. This is one of those. I think it comes from a place of insecurity. I'm worried people will judge me because of some running aspect of my posts. But this is an insecurity I endorse. The whole point of this blog is to be representation of myself for other people to understand me better. If I don't care what others think of my, I should delete this blog.
Therefore, here's my disclaimer: when confronted between posting something imperfect now, or posting something perfect later, I will almost always tend towards posting it now. This largely because of this tumblr post:
For the purpose of this blog, functional is all I need. Actually making a blogpost is really hard to do. You have to find time to work on it outside of all your other responsibilities, and there is little outside pressure to get you to do it. When the writing gets boring and tedious, it is very very very easy to just... not make the post. My "drafts" bin on Wordpress is a testament to this. So, whenever I get into the position where I have something that is not that great but at least addresses the things I want it to address, I'll post it.
"Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough"
My Dad
All of this said, I do not believe in mediocrity always. Perfectionism is incredibly beautiful and valuable. It's a battle against entropy that most people don't choose to fight. This is because many things are very heavy-tailed in terms of impact. It's the flip side of the 80/20 rule. Although 80% of the quality might come from 20% of the work, what if only the top 20% of works produce 80% of the impact?
Here, it makes sense to put in wayyy more effort in order to perfect an idea. Careers and battles aren't made and lost in the 80% range. They're made and lost in the 99.9% range, where the last, fleeting amount of value can be the difference between an ascendent, transformative project and another irrelevant addition to the corpus of human endeavors.
But, the issue is, you can't be a perfectionist about everything. Your time is limited. This is why I you should choose very few things to spend a lot of your time on, and half, or even quarter ass the rest. And this blog is one of those things. Maybe one day I'll decide to actually make this blog into something more than just a scream into the void, and start trying to perfect my posts. But for now, I'll have to settle for good enough.