Be Ruthless
You may or may not know this, but we’ve taken the best (relatively speaking) of seasons one and two (and soon three) of these missives and turned them into short books, Unqualified Opinions, You Can’t Buy All the Biscuits, and the forthcoming Don’t Skimp on the Swag, respectively. This gives us something to hand out to people who stop by the office (alongside our sweet swag shops), so if you want one (or more), come visit!
But a consequence of keeping these books on hand at the office is that I read them over and over again looking for (and finding!) things I might have done better. So it went the fortieth or so time I read You Can’t Buy All the Biscuits when I was about two-thirds of the way through and realized that the book was just too long. And that the reason it was too long was because past me told SarahBethGDub that I thought we should include some chapters that I liked, but that in hindsight really didn’t need to be there.
So I jumped on Slack and wrote to the team “Biscuits is too long and that’s on me. If we do another one, it should be as tight as the first one. Let’s be ruthless.”
(And hopefully the forthcoming Don’t Skimp on the Swag reflects that.)
See, a danger of having your own ideas is that (at least initially) you like them. A further danger is that it feels good when the world acts on your ideas and so you tend to be a little biased (subconsciously or not) about pushing for them. But the world isn’t about you or your ideas, it’s about utility and value, so optimize for that.
I had a writing professor in college who could be pretty ruthless. He said after giving us an assignment that after we finished writing it to then cut it by at least 33% because the world doesn’t have time for or care about at least that amount of what we think or have to say. That’s kind of a cold view, but probably also not wrong.
Yet it’s also in recognition that if you meet the world on its terms and not yours, you’re likely to enjoy much better experiences and outcomes. So be ruthless. It’s not as bad as it sounds.
-Tim
