Introduction
Everybody makes things.
I donât mean that everybody is an artist, thatâs the kind of sentence that makes people close the tab and discard my whole point as baloney. I mean it literally. You have, at some point in your life, put a playlist in an order that mattered to you. Written a message and then rewritten it before sending. Built something in Minecraft, or a spreadsheet you were quietly proud of, or a joke you turned over in your head a few times before saying it out loud. The urge to make a thing and then show it to somebody is about as human as it gets, and it doesnât switch off just because youâve decided at some point that you arenât creative.
Why do we make things? Why do we want to make things?
Nobody is forcing you to, thereâs no external reason for most of it. And yet.
Here's a question for you: how much should it bother you that most of what you make isn't any good?
Keep that in your head, iâll come back to it.
On Americaâs Labor Day, in 1953, science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon made a talk at the World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia. Theodore Sturgeon had spent the previous couple of years defending science fiction to the masses, to the kind of people that had never read the genre and never planned to. At this convention specifically, he has been recounted in saying:
This was, at the time, a fair observation. Today we think of Star Trek and Star Wars, and other Hollywood hits that fall under the âscience fictionâ genre. Today, the cultural collective consciousness believes that ninety percent of science fiction -- as in, 90% of the science fiction page on Netflix, or 90% of the science fiction aisle at Waterstones -- isnât âcrudâ. It feels like the genre grew up. In truth, it hasnât. The science fiction row on Netflix is a curated shelf, so is the science fiction aisle in Waterstones. What grew up was the filter between you or me or the audience, and the works of fiction being written. Nobody is stocking the ninety percent, so nobody sees the ninety percent, and so we quietly conclude it stopped being made.âWhen people talk about the mystery novel [âŚ] they mention The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep.
When they talk about the western, they say there's The Way West and Shane.
But when they talk about science fiction, they call it 'that Buck Rogers stuff,'
and they say âninety percent of science fiction is crud.â â
Sturgeon continued:
âNinety percent of everything is crud.ââWell, they're right. Ninety percent of science fiction is crud. But then ninety percent of everything is crud, and it's the ten percent that isn't crud that is important. and the ten percent of science fiction that isn't crud is as good as or better than anything being written anywhere.â
Part One.
If 90% of everything is crap (Iâll be saying the word âcrapâ instead of âcrudâ from now on), and you make things, then 90% of what you make is crap. This isnât an insult and it isnât a prediction about you specifically, itâs just the rate. It means that the note-taking app that got as far as a database schema, or the song that got as far as four sets of chords, or the half-finished discord bot, or the half edited youtube video, or whatever example applies to you specifically -- all of that was always going to happen. None of that is evidence that one is âbadâ at making things, itâs just the way human creation works. Most things are bad, and most things donât work out, even if and when they are finished!
I feel like most people understand this in the abstract, but the main problem is that knowing it doesnât help much because as humans we donât experience our failures as a statistic -- we experience them one at a time.
Tom Scott makes this point in a video about getting started online, and it's stuck with me since. I don't think I've fully embraced it even as I write this, but it turns up as an objective truth every time it's applicable: that the chances of a project succeeding donât really have much to do with how much time, effort or money has been spent on it.
People, myself included, complain that the specific project theyâve poured all of their heart and soul into doesnât ever reach anywhere. But the one little quick and dirty thing that took no effort whatsoever? Others found that more interesting and funnier, and enjoyed it much more than the large project.
You canât simply buy your way out of this phenomenon, if you spend ÂŁ0 and an hour on a project it is likely to fail, yet if you spend ÂŁ1,000,000 and a year on a project it is still likely to fail. Money doesnât move the rate here at all! It only moves the cost per attempt. And starting out, with nothing behind you -- no followers, no subscribers, no users, no recognition beyond the one niche community you find yourself in -- that can be a trap that demotivates you and causes you to make nothing in the end.
If you instead took that time, that year and that money that you wouldâve spent in that year, and made five, or ten, or twenty or thirty or a hundred projects all throwing them at the wall and putting them on the internet for all to see; youâd have a much larger chance of hitting that 10% that is genuinely a good idea beyond your own biases, a larger chance of hitting a good number of projects that other people not only want to see, but have seen. Have watched, have played with, have signed up to. If the rate is fixed, which Sturgeons Law tells us that it is, the number of attempts are your only lever to success. Programmingâs cost per attempt is near zero! A stupidly good deal, and one that every aspiring developer should take for their playground of learning new concepts and shipping fun ideas or web toys.
Part Two.
Of course, all of this assumes that you count âsuccessâ as being popular. The argument for volume only works if you want to maximise the chances of yourself or your project being popular on the internet. Say you spend a Saturday morning developing something, put it online, and nobody comes. What actually failed there? The code works, youâre better at something than you were on Friday. The only thing that failed is a number of views or users...?
Well -- not nothing. Let's not pretend. If you wanted people to see the thing, and people didn't see the thing, that's a real disappointment and I'm not going to talk you out of it. But really remember what that number measures, at the end of the day itâs whether someone bigger posted something similar that week. Itâs what time you hit publish. Itâs whether the âalgorithmâ we catch ourselves in nowadays was in the mood. Itâs a number that is measured by whether or not the people who wouldâve loved it happened to be scrolling at that time. It is a measurement of other peopleâs behaviour, and you have almost no influence over any of it.
Thatâs fine as a thing to want, yet itâs disastrous as a thing to grade yourself on. That could very possibly be the grade that keeps you going or not. How many people do you know, maybe even yourself, who stopped streaming on twitch or making youtube videos because, deep down, nobody was seeing it and that made them lose passion? Using this measurement as a baseline for carrying on makes the decision to continue doing whatever you love based on something you could have never truly controlled.
Hereâs what to measure instead!
What do you know now that you didnât know on Friday? Not vaguely. Specifically. Do you understand how OAuth actually works, rather than how to install a library that does OAuth for you? Did you write a parser for the first time and find out it wasnât the dark art you assumed it was? Did you learn that you hate writing frontend, and that youâd rather never do it again? That last one counts too, by the way. Ruling things out is data.
Now, I know how this sounds. It sounds like the thing that people say to you when a thing has flopped and theyre being kind about it. âNever mind! You learnt a lot!â. Iâm not doing that, because I donât think itâs the nice metric, I think itâs the harder one.
Views tell you about last Tuesday. They tell you what the algorithm was doing, who happened to be awake or what else happened to be posted at that time. Thatâs about it. Itâs a report on conditions that no longer exist. What you learnt, by contrast, tells you about the next thing you make -- the only part that you have any say over.
Sturgeons law is a ratio, it isnât a quality bar. It says 90% of what you make is crap -- it says absolutely nothing about how good your crap is. Your hundredth bad project is a wildly different object to your first bad project; and while the rate never moves, the floor definitely does. Every time you make something, including and especially all of the times that nobody looked, the floor has moved. Nobody is watching that number increase. It increases regardless.
The other thing about this measurement is that nobody can take it off of you! Platforms die! As Iâve written about before, twitterâs API went away and took a decade of engagement numbers with it. Vine is gone. Sites get delisted, accounts get banned, view counts get reset by a redesign. None of that, no matter how demoralising, ever touches what you actually learnt by building the thing.
You only get this number, however, if you go and look for it. Failing without noticing what youâve learnt is the one way to actually waste the attempt. So write it down. One line in a text file when you abandon something -- what it was, what broke it and why. It takes thirty seconds, if that!, and is the only record youâll ever have of getting better.
Part Three.
Go and look at the Github profile of somebody you think is better than you.
If you donât develop, bear with me. This can be relayed to Instagram pages, or youtube channels, or anything social that you could compare yourself to in an unhealthy way.
Youâve probably done this before, and youâve probably felt a bit ill afterwards. Six pinned repositories, all of them finished, all of them with a readme that has a logo in it and little badges along the top. Meanwhile youâve got a folder on your desktop called projects with eleven things in it that donât run.
Itâs the Netflix shelf again.
Thatâs genuinely all it is. A pinned repository is a curated shelf in exactly the same way the science fiction aisle is also a curated shelf, and you are doing the same thing the audience does at Waterstones; quietly concluding that the ninety percent stopped being made. It didnât, itâs just not on the shelf, because why on earth would anybody put it there? Nobody pins the graveyard.
Every developer whose profile makes you feel inadequate has, somewhere on a drive, a directory called test, and next to it test2, and next to that one test2-actual. They may have branches they never merged; they may have repositories set to private because they were embarrassed by them. You are comparing your own unedited everything against somebody elseâs top ten percent.
Github makes this worse than most places, mind. The contribution graph! A year of little green squares, and not one of them says what it was for. A year of green from a project with fifty thousand users looks precisely identical to a year of green from a thing that got abandoned and never spoken of again. You cant tell the difference from the outside, and neither can anybody looking at yours. Which is the bit that took me a while to get, actually. You are somebody elseâs intimidating profile. Somebody has probably looked at your pinned repositories -- the two or three you were willing to admit to -- and had this exact feeling about you, with absolutely no idea about the four things you binned that month, or the one you deleted entirely because it made you cringe to look at.
The shelf is not the shop.
Part Four.
Nobody made you do this.
Itâs worth sitting with that for a second because itâs a really easy thing to forget. Thereâs no deadline with any of it. Nobody who set the brief, nobody is marking it, and if you stopped tomorrow the only person who would really notice is yourself. Whatever it is youre building at the minute, you started it because you wanted the thing to exist, or because you wanted to find out whether you could actually build it. That was the reason and it was a perfectly, perfectly good one.
So where did the scoreboard come from?
Because you didnât write it, somebody else did. The follower count on your profile, the star count on your repository, the little view count under the video -- all of them is a design decision somebody else made in a meeting. They are there because showing you a number keeps you coming back to look at the number. Itâs not a conspiracy, im not calling out these platforms for it. Itâs just, the way things work. Itâs just product design, and it works so well that most of us have quietly accepted a definition of success that arrived preinstalled, and that we never actually agreed to at any point.
Itâs the trap I mentioned earlier in part one. When youâre starting with nothing behind you whatsoever, that borrowed scoreboard doesnât read as âthis got low numbersâ, it reads as a verdict. It reads as the answer to whether you should keep going at all, and it is a genuinely terrible answer to that question.
So take it back off them, and pick your own criteria instead.
I donât mean that in a vague inspirational-poster sort of way. I mean literally decide, before you start, what would make the thing worth having done. And the good ones tend to be smaller and stranger than youâd expect. Getting to use a language youâve never touched before. Working with somebody whose stuff youâve admired for years. Making one specific person laugh. Finally understanding a thing youâve been avoiding because it looked to hard. Having something that exists, that you can point at, that you made.
The best example for me would be this very website that youâre viewing this content on. I had no idea how to use discordâs authentication before the guestbook on the home page, I had no idea how to get my website on webrings or the kagi small web. I didnât even really know how to write blog posts in a nice way for me, without needing to contend with html every time I want to share my thoughts. But it all means that my experience from making this site not only serves a purpose for me, it gives me a dumping ground to write up my feelings, but it also meant I learnt a lot whilst doing it. Skills that will help me on whatever the next thing is. And it doesnât have a counter next to it, there is no number on my github profile for âI finally understand this conceptâ. But It is important. It is a measurable thing for my success. And it would be wrong to ignore it.
Itâs a score that you keep to yourself. That sounds like a consolation prize at first, I get that, but only until you truly notice what that number actually means: that every other number you have ever graded yourself against was a decision somebody made, in a meeting, for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with you.
Yours is a decision you get to make.
So build that web toy. Make that youtube video. Write that song or start that twitch stream, and donât let it bother you that most of what you make wonât be any good. You should never expect your first tries to be. You should never expect your 500th try to be.
After all, its human to want to create things. Not to be perfect at it every time.
Thank you for reading.
- Dia