Don’t save the good stuff

My latest column for 3 Quarks Daily is live, entitled, “A Creative State of Mind Starts with Curiosity and Pronoia.” I’ve been wanting to explore these topics in a new book, but the way I was going about it wasn’t very useful. In the spirit of publishing before making it perfect the second time, I decided to take some ideas I was already exploring and post them. I stopped saving the good stuff, and started posting them as best as I could. People who might find the work useful don’t need to wait for me to keep polishing it. Publishing improves this idea’s lifetime value. Two excerpts helped move this train of thought forward: Derek Sivers writes, “My top recommendation for anybody that emails me and asks about publishing a book is I advise them to not do it in secret. I suggest that they take every single idea, every chapter, and post it very publicly, and email everybody they know, and share it on every platform as individual small chapters to get the feedback from the world so that…