Less effort can make things better

The first thing that everyone learns when writing in the 'real world', outside of an academic setting, is that it's important to be simple and concise. You need to unlearn much that your teachers told you: minimizing rather than maximizing wordcount, omitting 'however' in favour of 'but', and so on.

This feels counter-intuitive at first, because writing that way is actually easier. It violates the principle that hard work and effort are necessary for payoff.

There are some email newsletters I subscribe to that frequently remind me of this. I'm subscribed to one named '5 Tweet Tuesday' that is indeed a list of five 280-character tweets. I open it without fail, because there is no downside (I know I'm not going to get bored) and some upside: I know there's a reasonable chance one of them will be interesting. I imagine that it probably takes the author no more than twenty minutes to compile.

Another is the daily blog of a guy named Matt Rickard. He blogs every day without fail and emails out every one. What enables him to do that is that his emails are very short. In fact, in another violation of the rules of academic writing, they're frequently unfinished: I usually leave wishing that'd he'd go on and delve deeper into whatever he's discussing.

Far from being a mistake, this is actually a genius move on his part. He can give his posts just as grandiose a title as if they were a longread essay, increasing likelihood that readers actually open his emails. And by writing short, unfinished posts, he reduces the chance I will associate his emails with boredom to ~0%: instead, I leave his writing wanting more, and will open the next email in the hope of getting it.

I found that when creating this website, less effort produced better results. For the first iteration, I felt that since I had some knowledge of how to code, I was obliged to write everything from scratch.

I realized after a few weeks of screwing around with it that there was no point spending time on this: what did the reader care if I wrote the code to parse markdown files myself or not? I scrapped it, cloned and customized a nice template, and had something functional working the next day. By virtue of being finished, my low-effort website was better than the one I spent more time on.

A theme I've noticed is that the minimum bar for making yourself happy can often be higher than the minimum bar to provide value to others. To write a long-form essay that you feel fully satisfied with, you might need to be insightful and original and smart - that might be the quality bar. But to provide value to other people, sometimes you just need to send them a list of links and avoid boring them, or spend a few paragraphs talking about an interesting idea. My aim is that this blog will fall into that latter category.