Perfectionism in Your Writing Is Killing Your Dreams of Writing Full Time

Always aim for quantity first

It’s 2015. I’m 21 years old and ready to dish out advice about living a stress-free life on my brand-new blog. 

And yes, I cringe looking back. Obviously, a 21-year-old man was living a stress-free life… 

But no matter!

I start writing, sure that my words will touch and inspire a generation. My first post takes weeks to write. It’s lovingly nurtured until finally, I hit publish.

And nothing happens.

I thought that publishing high-quality blog posts was going to be my ticket to success. I would agonise over every sentence and paragraph and spend hours looking for the right photo, only to publish the post to absolutely no one…

I eventually went on to become a full-time digital writer and creator, but I could have gotten there so much faster if I had realized the truth.

Quality is king. But the fastest way to achieve quality is through quantity.

The maths on your first three months as a writer

You publish 10 posts, spending 10 hours on each article. 

Vs

You publish 100 post, spending 1 hour per article. 

Either way, you spend 100 hours practicing. But the version of you who published 100 posts will be so far ahead that he won’t see Mr 10 posts in the rearview mirror.

And it’s because of the power of iterative learning. 

The secret of iterative learning

Iterative learning is where you practice through volume. For us as writers, it’s going through iterations of writing articles. Every article you write is a chance to improve, and so every successive article can be better than the last one, and you build all the skills needed to succeed.

Yes, once you are an established writer, slowing down to hone your craft might be the best idea. But initially, you need to charge through as many complete articles as you can.  Here’s why:

More articles = more headlines

The sad truth of writing online is that if you don’t nail your headline, you’re fighting an uphill battle. Your headlines and your ideas are the core foundation of your writing, and so you need to practice writing them.

Yes, you can sit and write headlines in isolation. But unless you put them out into the world, you never know if they work. 

More headlines = more feedback

By hitting publish in public, you get to see how your article performed. You find out if people liked the idea, you find out if people clicked the article, and you can measure how many views it gets. 

This is implicit feedback. The feedback you get by measuring the the performance of the article. This is compared to direct feedback, where someone reads it and tells you what to improve. 

Both are important. But if you want to develop your writing into a business, you need to use your writing to get attention. 

More feedback = faster learning

And so the more feedback you get, the more you can measure what’s working, and you start to learn how writing online works. When one article performs better than the rest, you can sit down and figure out why. 

You can look at your headline, read the comments, and piece together why the article did well so that you can improve a little for your next attempt. 

I eventually learned this lesson, but it wasn’t until my third attempt at launching a blog that I decided to just write and write until something stuck. After 50 tries (on top of the other 70 articles I’d published online), an article worked. 

I was then able to double down on the article style that worked, and nine months later, I quit my job to write full-time. 

Avoid the trap

There’s a sweet spot between banishing perfectionism and not trying hard enough. This only works if you still commit to improving yourself while also writing as much as possible. 

It comes from practice. You find out where the line is between publishing an unedited draft and spending too long fretting over word choice in your conclusion. I opt for this seven-step process:

1. Come up with a headline
2. Write 5-10 versions of the headline
3. Outline the post
4. First draft
5. One full read-through and re-draft 
6. Edit with Grammarly
7. Publish

This forces you to work through each stage of the process without getting bogged down in endless redrafting, and with practice, you get better at this. 

Perfectionism is holding you back. Learn quickly through iterative practice and watch your results skyrocket.

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