The Wall between Published work and “work that basically doesn’t exist”

What happens when the stakes are taken off the table and people are comfortable with writing and publishing their thoughts directly online?

Adam is a thoughtful person. He is introspective, is definitely an introvert, and he is someone you’d identify as smart on your first encounter. Nothing is beneath him as he ponders issues of all types, from food fads to human behaviour to politics.

But his thoughts are caged within his life. Those interesting and potentially meaningful ideas that originate from some part of his brain is kept in there, or at best, on some piece of scrap paper or his Evernote account. It’s always been this way because even though Adam is smart — perhaps because he is smart — he doesn’t publish what he writes online.

Publishing online remains a hoop some refuse to jump through despite enabling technologies like WordPress (where you can self-host a blog with a custom domain like www.adamsblog.com) and even Medium (where you worry about virtually nothing but the words). Words on scrap paper remains a lower, more stable state of being than text on a screen for some.

But it’s a pity. As Derek Sivers reckons, you ought to “publish your work online, otherwise they basically don’t exist” (paraphrased from Tim Ferriss’ podcast). For Adam, then, his work basically doesn’t exist! Not that it bothers Adam, though, as he reconciles it as “the way things are”. It’s just normal to not publish whatever you write online immediately, if ever.

It’s our pity, not Adam’s

Adam continues to have fascinating thoughts every day (just as most of us do occasionally) and he continues to write lengthy notes on them in his personal Evernote account. In the meantime, society is missing out. A virtual wall exists between his account and the rest of the Web, and we’re not privy to a clever person’s thoughts.

It’s a shame if you ask me, because so many interesting conversations could have been had if only some (more) of Adam’s meditations were accessible to the world.

For sure, Medium is slowly demolishing that wall by enticing people to write and not worry about whether it’s worthwhile to publish online (since they are the ones taking care of readership, not you). But progress is slow. If you take a look at the kinds of articles that populate your Medium feed, you’d realise how similar most of the posts are in terms of topic.

Take an even closer look and you’d find a handful of writers dominating your feed (which is partially the result of who you choose to Follow, but part of it is also the demographic of readers and writers on Medium, which I imagine to be still mostly male and white). Progress in getting a greater diversity of people to write and publish online is evidently slow.

To the future

It is my hope that more of us will build products and services that will, in effect, take down the wall between published work and “work that basically doesn’t exist.” We’d have better representation of perspectives, more lessons to learn from, and a greater pool of interesting stories to read. That’s a worthwhile goal in my honest opinion.

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Thanks for taking the time to read this. I’m trying to practice what I’m advocating — publishing more of my thoughts online — with this piece as part of an experiment. Do you think humanity will be better off if we are able to hear real-life stories from more people? How so?

Let me know what you think with a Reply, and Recommend this post if you think someone else might (dis)agree.