Why I’m only now starting to write.

I forget why, but in the shower this morning I was telling my girlfriend about why I’d seen a therapist as a child. “To figure out what the hell was wrong with me.” In elementary school I’d just sit through reading time with my book shut on my desk, staring blankly at it. If you had to judge me by my reading comprehension alone, you’d safely assume I wasn’t sentient.

Not much has changed. If I want to actually learn something, I have to seek it out myself. Maturing has only increased my capacity to selectively hear some good advice, and it turns out I can actually read if I seek the content. I’m still the same rigidly-autodidactic learner.

With that constraint, becoming someone with a career of sorts involved some luck and a (mostly-accidental) systemic approach. Really, I just copy things I think are neat. Stuff I’ve made is just chop-shopped inspiration, baked with enough pattern matching and self-criticism along the way for the result to appear more than plagiarism. In doing this over many years, I’ve idolized the best designers, engineers, and musicians I was aware of with enough obsession to want to burn 99% of my own ideas with fire. I’ve just countered it with a necessarily narcissistic belief that I ought to be able to be among them. Keeping that feedback loop short enough has allowed some of my ideas to escape into reality during my lifespan.

That relentless loop of trying to mash up inspiration and then berating the shit out of it until producing something that seems worthy is the system. But the luck is inherent to it… because I was always taking inspiration from the people I thought were the best at the time, I would inevitably be lead to one of two (often recurring) realizations:

1. That person truly is a pioneer of something great.
2. That person isn’t actually the best, my poor taste is exposed, I disown my former self, shift my focus toward the new best person’s work, and continue in a mildly less-naïve direction.

The former realization (when it’s correct) means that I am doing something practically unique, worth doing, and truly hard. These are the criteria that distinguish between contributions that advance their domains, and work that’s just pissing in the ocean. The latter realization ends up trending toward the former.

I emerge from this obsessive loop needing to create great value or die trying. I owe so much of the success I’ve had so far to others’ writing. Tutorials, books, talks and comments — the content of people who had been generous enough to publish has allowed me to participate in and expand upon some of the most exciting contributions I’ve ever seen. Because of this, I evaluate my own writing against expectations that are informed by the best things I’ve ever read.

The enabling realization I’ve had recently is that perspective itself can be a contribution worth sharing, even if you don’t find that it contains “new developments.” As it turns out, all communication media involves a negotiation between story and reality, which is both the content of perspective, and what has allowed me to get this far.