May 30
My best work came from stupidity
How to prevent your articles from being boring
The stupider version of my current self, aka the past, has produced better work than the work I produce today.
Said simply, the best work I’ve created has also been my first.
My first article still stands as my most insightful article.
One of my first poems has the best one-liner I’ve ever written: “You said look on the bright side, I could go to Disneyland twice as much, but what was the point if I could only hold one hand?” (It’s also a crazy run-on sentence).
But that same quality of work is absent in my current articles.
Often times (actually most of the time) when I edit my articles, I’ll see something so horrible, that I’ll ask myself, “Who wrote this garbage?” And precisely when I ask that question, I realize I very well know the answer, and I fall into great despair.
Point being, I’m prouder of my past than I am of my present, and I can’t help but wonder, “Why?”
Thinking about it now, makes me wonder if the answer is stupidity.
Back then, I had little experience, skill, or knowledge. I had nothing going for me. I was stupid. And with that stupidity, came naivety.
When I was stupid, or naive, I did things that weren’t ‘allowed.’ I broke the rules of poetry and said, “what was the point,” breaking age-old traditions and rhyme schemes in the process. I wrote on article on the most popular topic in the productivity world -procrastination- and I didn’t even fill it up with keywords for SEO.
Yet, with all this stupidity, when I look back and compare my past self to my present, I notice something missing. As I’ve gotten smarter, my work seems to have gotten dull.
In this process of learning, as artists, writers, jobless people with nothing better to do, whatever you want to call yourself, our work has lost that simple, naive, stupid flavor that we once had.
Instead, we meticulously follow each rule to precision, editing our work to death, doing as much as we can to try and craft a masterpiece. But now, I wonder I’m actually just creating a bland and soulless piece of work.
Our knowledge has prevented our stupidity and naivety.
Usually, the real reason we stop this is not because we think it’s unprofessional or it dilutes our masterpiece, but because we’re afraid to do something bold.
What if it doesn’t land? What if the editors don’t accept it? What if the audience doesn’t like it?
But let’s just enter that reality for a second. Say you do something bold or naive or stupid. The worst that happens is that the audience hates it and maybe you lose a couple of followers. Even with that, you’ve created something you enjoyed, and you’ve learned a ton.
So, now the real question for a lot of us is, “How do I do something stupid?”
No, that’s not the real question, there are plenty of ways to do that.
No, what I really want to encourage you to do is to ask yourself, “How can I do something cool?”
Breaking that apart, you’re really asking two things: “What’s something that I think is cool?” and “What’s the best way to communicate it?”
That’s it. Don’t overcomplicate it. Trying to assume what the audience thinks is cool is guaranteed to fail. You can experiment and test it out, but at first, the only person you can ask, is yourself.
So, try it. Ask yourself, “What can I do that’s cool” and “How do I communicate it?”
Me personally, it’s self-deprecating humor. So, I hope this read wasn’t a total waste of your time.
