The reason you should try to be bad at writing

Perfectionism

I hate that word.

It is the enemy of prolific bodies of work and must be avoided at all costs.

Don’t get me wrong, I used to be a complete and total perfectionist. Bordering on the OCD.

That’s how I know it sucks.

I would go hard on the details. I wouldn’t look at the bigger picture. And then, at the end, realize that my audience had moved on.

People have short attention spans. And clients have short timeframes for making money or seeing results; the right clients don’t care about the cherry on top, they just want the milkshake.

Leave perfectionism to the robots and ChatGPT. They are good at it.

At the end of the day, most people don’t want to have a medically sterile product anyway. They want results.

So, I’ve had to resist every instinct in my being and shed the perfectionism coat. It wasn’t serving me.

Oh sure, it was useful in my engineering career when I was designing safety circuits for highly hazardous nuclear reactor control systems in chemical plants. In that situation you need to spend weeks and months going over everything with a fine-tooth comb.

Business and marketing is different.

Speed of iteration is your friend. And a necessary friend.

The first place that I have been practicing this new style of work is on Twitter/X.

And in a year of writing on Twitter/X, I’ve discovered a framework that I use each and every time I start typing out tweets.

It’s called the 70-20-10.

Out of week’s worth of posts,

• 70% will be just ok

• 20% will suck

• 10% will great

It’s a volume game.

Every single post won’t be a banger (unless you are my friend Atlas).

You won’t get to the good stuff unless you are ok with pumping out some (relatively) hot garbage.

If you spend all of your time perfecting the stuff that won’t hit with your audience anyway, you’re wasting your time.

It’s better to have an 85% perfect post that will connect you to 100 new potential fans than it is to have a mirror-polish perfect post that only 3 of your existing audience sees (and don’t necessarily like).

So, start putting in the reps.

Swanagan