Is My Story Garbage or Do Good Ones Often Go Unnoticed?
I always read without looking at the claps first. Rarely do I find an article I consider worth of appraisal that has not received it.
When something makes it worth stopping and clapping for, they rarely do not have several claps and comments already.
I’ve used this insight to try and discover why not many noticed my article.
‘All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer…’
‘…It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions’ — Ira Glass
If I have that killer taste and I’m able to use it to identify it in other people’s work, why am I thinking mine is worth it but is not receiving it?
I might be biased, I figured.
Maybe there’s Survivorship Bias. May there be a lot of articles I would consider bangers. But, they don’t get noticed; I don’t get to see them. Therefore I conclude: all bangers are noticed.
And what a shame would that be if I’m biased this way. It would be a failure of Medium’s algorithm as far as I’m concerned.
It would mean there are a lot of high-quality articles out there never appraised by, or because of, it.
But it could also be if this failure of the algorithm were rarely the case, that other bias acts in place when I think my article is worth any appraisal at all.
This thought brings a lot of other questions regarding self-worth and is self-doubt-inducing. And if not careful enough could undermine confidence in publishing. Make become the pissed-at-the-world guy, on the log cabin in the woods. And, of this, another of thousand things I’ve started, stopped, and abandoned.
This time though, passion seems to say, fuck that. I rather keep experimenting and methodically analyzing until I figure it out.
My bad.
All of this came out of thinking how long an article about my medium “game plan” could become, and therefore how less likely it would be that it’d be read and finished.
When I read other people, I do notice in myself this lack of compromise and attention span for long posts, even at ones I’m highly interested in the topic.
On my game plan article, I’m thinking I could mention my noticed tendency to say a lot. Over-complicating things or feeling that a lot of very in-detail explained ideas have to be together in there too.
It’s difficult for me to control the 5-year-old habit of digressing and veering towards whatever; Of adding to an article like this the myriad of other links to other articles, quotes, anecdotes, and banger quotes that occur to me.
The only reader I used to have was myself, and I didn’t seem to bother.
Particularly because I didn’t read much myself after a while either.
“If you are doing it for them, you’ll be fine. If you are doing it for you, that could be problematic, at a certain point. Because they’ll know it, they’ll feel it, and they won’t like it” — Jerry Seinfeld.
Would like to give time to articles I’ve already published, read them later as I dissociate and forget. Read like is someone else’s work.
Then and there I’d be able to see if this theory, that I’m able to go through these long rants and other people are not because I’m way more invested than them on finishing (because they are mine), has any truth in it.
If you are interested in seeing how that goes. You can give a follow.
As a (used to be, I guess) internet Lurker, from ‘how to make it on medium’ articles I learned the importance of networking. So I’ve been reading a couple of articles from the few followers I have at the moment (5).
The game plan story idea (that induced this post) came from another article from whom Medium suggests is my first real follower Peter White. I read him with the interest I have in understanding who I am writing for. And I might as well read you too.
Thank you for reading.
