What if you treat everything you do as simply practice for something else in future?

(This is another one of my “optimal to believe is true even if false”isms)

It takes the pressure off. If you’re worried about, say, how your first customer call might go: give yourself permission for it to be bad. Or, rather, for it to go however it goes.

I don’t think this essay is very good.

I could therefore easily decide not to publish it.

Or even to stop writing more words. Maybe even to stop hearing the words that my mind is generating—editing them away in realtime before they hit the paper.

But if I simply reframe and move the goalposts, from “it has to be good per my taste” to “it’s practice for other things I’ll write in future… of course it’s bad… that’s the only way to get good!”… then I can keep writing.

The words keep flowing.

It’s still not as good as my taste would like it to be.

But now I’m OK with that.

The first 100 of anything will be bad. There’s no way around that. Might as well get them out as fast as I can.