Writing more, less perfectly

There’s a quote often attributed to Sheryl Sandberg: “done is better than perfect”. 

My blogging has been based off of ‘perfect’ for the past few years - if the idea wasn’t quite right, I didn’t write. I had an idea in my head of what a blog post should look like - length, originality, grammar, etc., and this was the baseline standard to post. 

The implication of this for me was that I’ve been writing and posting less than I’d like to. 

This past week I’ve been reading the new Tim Ferris book, Tools of Titans. In the book, James Altucher talks how perfection kills idea generation - so, ‘if you can’t generate 10 ideas, generate 20’ (accepting - without fear - that the majority of these ideas will be bad). Through this process, more good ideas surface on an absolute basis than trying to think about a handful of perfect ideas. Openness to bad ideas leads to discovering important ideas. 

As I attempt to write more, I’m hopeful the effect will be the same for me.