Life is a Rough Draft

Remember in grade school when there was a heavy emphasis on not only the final version of essays but also the rough drafts? There would be deadlines for those multiple rough drafts. First drafts and second drafts. I think that, similarly, life can be thought of as a rough draft comprised of a sequence of smaller rough drafts.

Relationship Drafts

My friend has been Internet dating and recently told me about his experiences. People finding him online, him finding others. Then a flurry of emails, text messages, voice mails and in some cases meetings in person. He calls it a ‘blur’. I tell him it sounds neat. He’s starting a lot of relationship drafts and learning a lot about himself and others in the process. Granted I understand how that process can also be taxing.

Over the past month or so I’ve been visiting sprout, an incredible maker/thinking/learning space in Somerville. There are a lot of people inning and outing there. Meeting so many people in a short span of time is a unique experience for me. Sometimes I’ll go home from sprout and question how I interacted with someone. Could that person have taken what I said the wrong way? Does that person like me?

Some relationships stick longer than others and the ones that don’t stick are important to think about too. They’re all drafts, all trial and error. Especially with relationships, the final, totally polished version is a myth. It doesn’t exist. There will always be rough edges to our relationships. Creating new drafts and revising others are what matter.

Unstarted Drafts

Some of those relationship drafts might end abruptly. But other drafts will never get a chance to be started.

And that’s okay in some cases. It’s necessary. Oftentimes the mind goes wild. We can’t actualize and release every draft into the world. I can’t try and make a connection with everyone I pass. I can’t try to write every blog post I think about. It’s not possible. The constraints are time and mental capacity. And those are real.

But there are also many reasons to not begin a draft that are flawed. I don’t have the skills to do that. That has already been done. I don’t want to fail. People won’t like it. People won’t like me.

I was talking with a friend at a party a couple weeks ago. He’s considering starting a blog about the space he’s interested in professionally.

“So why not start in on it,” I asked.

“I don’t know. It’s just that I haven’t blogged before and what if I’m no good. Then maybe future employers will find it and won’t hire me because of it.”

That exchange brings up an interesting point in that, for some people, there’s an expectation that exists that one should be a final version of what an employer (or a partner in a relationship) desires. And if there is that expectation and some people don’t keep drafting because of it and get feedback on it, how do we grow?

If you were to look at some old posts here at this blog you’d find some very primitive examples of code that I created. At the time though they stemmed from new insights. Although I can find flaws looking back at them, I am happy to have published those drafts because I know it was good for me. Putting them here was part of the process of recording, learning and drafting.

Those that find success in life never stop creating and revising drafts. Feedback from others is crucial to the process of revision. But feedback that inhibits the process of drafting, growing, and learning is stifling.

One question that lingers though is that, since we can’t pursue all draft ideas, how do we choose? How do we know when to stop revising? Is it just going with the gut?

Unsprung Drafts

Not all drafts need to be broadcast to other people. I guess it’s a personal thing on deciding which to share. Largely though, sharing drafts with other people is important to the process of drafting. Just like in grade school. Getting feedback on our thoughts can be very beneficial assuming that we value the perspectives of the people that are providing the feedback.

There are some drafts that are meant to be broadcast. Websites for instance (as long as they aren’t intranets) are meant to be shared with the world, or at least a subset of it. I’ve been helping C with a new website for her studio and it’s really ready to go. I think that it has been ready to make live for a couple weeks now. C has had some lingering issues with it though and, because of that, it hasn’t been launched yet. As a web developer, I have seen this same thing many times with clients. I I think it has to do with that notion above that, professionally speaking and perhaps otherwise too, there’s an expectation that everything comes polished and perfect. And if it isn’t, it really shouldn’t be exposed to the world. But I think that it’s just a matter of time before that societal belief diminishes. With the proliferation of web apps and software, there has been a growing acceptance that products and services can be released as ‘beta’. Sometimes this thing might not work as you expect. It might break. It’s a little rough and that’s okay. The truth is this has always been the case and will always be the case. Everything is in beta. Everyone is in beta.

If we keep that in mind and embrace it then I think we’d all be better off. Just in the case of the website, if we would have launched a couple weeks ago we would have had all this time to get feedback on it to make it better and get changes made more quickly. Those users that visited within the last couple weeks would have had a much better experience even if there were kinks to work out with the new site.

I do it too. I’ve been working on a new project called tinybatch.com. I have a lot of work into it. But I have these lingering questions about the value of the site and business. Is it too complicated for users to understand? What if no one wants to use it? Is it too similar to sites that already exist? And these doubts and questions have halted my continued development on it. My friend Matt was giving me a pep talk about it the other day and the truth is that my questions aren’t based in anything real. The only way to really answer those questions and to learn of new questions is to finish up the project and release it to the world. Let people try it. Get real feedback on it. Spring the draft.