Please stop paying me
A few days ago I realized something. I don’t like writing.
I realized it because I found creative energy to work on programming projects again, and I experience writing programs differently from how I experience having to write. Even the turn of phrase “having to write” betrays my disposition toward the craft.
When I’m very excited to build products or just program computers for the joy of programming, I dread going to sleep and every part of me cannot wait to wake up and write code again. I’ve never felt that about writing. Writing has always been a chore. I think I’ve known this all along, but have never been able to admit this to myself until now.
When you read anything about anything anywhere, it tells you what great [INSERT CALLING HERE] do. Great startup founders and engineers write well and write a lot because without clear writing there is no clear thinking. I think I bought into that too much for my own good. So it feels liberating to say: I hate writing. It’s painful and laborious and every good piece of writing I make feels like delivering a baby. A rewarding experience for sure, but I think even the most loving of mothers would stop being so loving if she had to deliver a new baby every week.
One thing that duped me is a lot of positive reenforcement. My best pieces of writing get tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of readers, and that gives me an addicting sense of elation. I certainly never expected to make money doing it, but enough of you find my writing sufficiently interesting to offer the ultimate seal of approval— you transfer money from your wallet into mine. I deeply appreciate it, and deeply appreciate you spending time on reading my essays, but unfortunately this isn’t sufficient impetus for me to produce good work. When I’m forced to write on a schedule, my writing sucks and my life is miserable.
Which is a good reminder why some of my writing is good. It’s good when I have something important to say. Important things are hard to say by definition— if they were easy people would have already talked them out and they probably would have lost their importance. At least they’re hard to say for me. So when I do it it’s always very slow and painful, and it turns out good because I say something that matters to me in a way that nobody else bothered or managed to say. With my particular idiosyncrasies the intersection of that and the business of running a newsletter is an empty set.
So please stop paying me. For the folks that have prepaid, I’m not exactly sure how Substack tooling handles this situation, but shoot me an email and I’ll figure out how to return a prorated amount.
I will continue writing. When I have something important to say, I’ll go through the pain necessary for me to say it. I’ll also write about my observations as I pursue my product and programming work— technical, anthropological, and simply keeping you up to do date on what I’m up to. I don’t expect you’ll be hearing from me less often. In fact, I’m hoping this will allow me to write more. But owing people weekly essays as a matter of business isn’t my tao. For all the reasons above, and primarily because it makes the essays suck, and I don’t like producing bad work.
Until next week, hopefully. Slava.
Just wanted to say, I believe any creative work you do is highly impacted by both your skill on the type of work and your excitement about the subject. If you try to code something you're not interested in, it's quite painful. At least for me it is. With writing I believe it's the same. I'd guess your problem lies on the learning curve. You're good enough to notice the problems with your writing, but still not experienced enough to understand how to solve it without pain.
Programming sometimes feel like that, but I believe most people stop so early on the programming learning curve they don't even know that they suck. I mean, it took me some good 10 years of being paid to do this stuff before I actually started to understand lambda functions and ruby blocks and stuff like that, plus some 5 more years to actually force myself to write anything relevant in LISP and start breaking some preconceptions I had, add that to the about 5 years of scripting stuff (mIRC, some PHP etc) and it's 20 years, and I still haven't reached LISP Enlightenment... Most programming being done anywhere I look is actually a lot closer to scripting, so it's a lot easier to feel happy with your results, especially after you understand the more complex constructs and can easily understand you produced something better than 90% of what you see out in the world.
I say this based not only on my experience with many things, but based on may conversations with friends, especially about "talent" which is a subject I was very interested in at one point in time. I'm lucky enough to have many professional artists in my social circle (Though most are not very prominent, but they all do make a living off of their art and are really good, at least IMHO), and every writer, musician or drawing artist I know thinks the idea of talent is bullsh*t and people just get better at stuff when they practice, and they all agree that they only start enjoying it as they get better, be it people who play instruments professionally since as early as 6 years old or people who learned instruments after they were adults. Ultimately everyone I talked to concluded that the only limitation was perseverance, since the improvement and competence themselves brought happiness, even in cases where the person wasn't as interested in the subject (Bands where most/all of the family play together being the prime example I recall here).
To put it bluntly, I believe people should write only when they have meaningful things they want to say, but when they DO have meaningful things they want to say they should REALLY write it, even if they think it sucks and/or they can't properly explain and/or they don't release after all. Because that's the only way to gain experience and ultimately get to a point where they can be happy writing.
Your writing does matter, it was you that got me interested in LISP. Well ok, Paul Graham probably also had some influence, but I didn't write anything until I read http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html and this is what made me actually believe that there was a point in learning LISP, so I still think you were the biggest influence.
So I hope you continue to write, but as something to enjoy, and considering the eventual pains as part of the learning process. Pretty much like you did with LISP, according to your 2006 article I mentioned above.
I love your writing :)
The topics you pick is like nothing else I found on web.
I started reading a few months ago and when I read for the first time, I couldn't believe, that somebody is in very similar situation as me :) Nobody else says the things you say :)