Ideating for Hackathons (not really)

This story is not about hackathons…nor is it about ideation, per se.

This story is about writing — and sharing written word with the world. Confusing, I know 🤷‍

Consider this:

My friend and former co-worker, Kevin — an accomplished writer/storyteller — led a series of writing workshops for our team at Keen IO. Throughout the experience, a single, shiny nugget of wisdom became the “mantra” of our team’s collective compositional efforts, and it has stuck with me ever since:

Perfection is poison.

This brings me to why the title of this story appears to be completely unrelated to its substance…

Wait for it…

Several years ago, during my tenure at SendGrid, my teammate Adam held the responsibility of editing our company blog — an arguably unenviable role, given the shepherding required to generate a steady stream of content from a team of globetrotting community-builders. Adam asked the dozen of us to create a list of topics for future blog posts.

The title at the top of my list? You guessed it: “Ideating for Hackathons.”

Long story, short: I didn’t write that blog post for the SendGrid blog…or for the Keen IO blog…or for my personal blog…until now. Perfection obstructed progress.

This is it.

I’ve written a handful of things since committing to writing that thing about “ideating” and “hacking.” Those writings have reflected a shift within my life — characterized in part by fewer hours spent at hackathons and within the hacker community; but more so influenced by a philosophical and professional zoom-out, from the narrower focus on developer communities to the wider, more general focus on community-building at large.

So, here I am, [finally] following through on a promise to write a thing as entitled above, but with a twist.

The not-so-twisty takeaway:

It’s simple, really: the mantric phrase, “perfection is poison,” has been useful to me in my writing — in both private and public forums. Furthermore, it’s proven to be powerful in many other “use cases.” With that in mind, I figured it could be useful to others, too — maybe you?

Whenever I write, I do it for myself. Whenever I share my writing with others, I do it for myself and for anyone who decides to be my audience. This piece is for us.

The next time you feel the urge to write (journaling, blogging, a long-overdue note to a loved one, etc.) or take on any sort of creative project/task, revisit the idea of poisonous perfection and remind yourself: doing something imperfectly might be better than doing nothing at all.

Disclaimer

In today’s atmosphere, I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the obvious abundance of noise — especially in our digital/online lives. Indeed, finding signal amongst noise is sufficiently challenging already. One could argue that we have little to no need for additional blog posts, tweets, Facebook comments, etc.

To be clear, I’m not encouraging you to write and/or share “imperfect” content in the form of fake news or alternative facts or irrelevant, off-topic opinions. We all must be diligent in vetting the information we consume and filtering that which we disseminate.

But, if you have a story to share, a voice that must be heard, a message of love and positivity and unity to your fellow people, then by all means belt it out — even if it’s not perfect, it’s still important.

This is not a call for more noise. This is a call for more signal — thoughtful, empathetic, and respectful.