Just Write, You Dolt

anderegg.ca

3 points·GavinAnderegg··3 comments

This post really resonates with me today because I started journaling this year, and the rule I set for myself is to write (or, in my case, type) for a minimum of 5 minutes without judgement. Even if one of the sentences ends up being "I'm not sure what else to write", that's fine, because I'm just getting into the habit of taking the action step. It's been rewarding.

Your point about the journaling being to an audience of yourself makes sense. When you write on the internet, you open yourself to criticism from strangers on the internet. But, at least you took the action step of actually publishing it. That's how you get better.

This was an inspirational read. Thanks for posting and congrats on your HN success.

Congrats on HN post success. Did you get any criticism? How did you handle it? That's my biggest concern with writing and sharing more on the internet: people can be pretty darn ruthless when they don't agree with you.

I did, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be. This is also the main anxiety I need to get over, I think. With the PayPal article, it was mostly “this isn’t novel” — which was honestly fair. I shouldn’t have used that word when I meant “new to me”. The biggest pushback was from the Threads piece. There’s a lot of concern around Threads federating, and I got some reasonable criticism, but things felt civil and level-headed.

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