Why care?
I have always wanted to write more. I have a lot of ideas on my mind that I would like to share, but never got to doing it. Why? Well, it is not a mystery to me, and I probably am not the only one to have this issue—I care too much about how others view me.
A quarter of a post
I value my work. What I create is, in some regards, an extension of myself. Time goes on and I tend to think that what I did in the past does not reflect me in the present, so I go back and edit, rearrange, or even straight up remove my what I created.
At this point in time, I have a total of 10 posts deleted. This blog is in its 4th or 5th iteration.
What does that leave me with? A beautiful blog, which has exactly one post, from 2 years ago. That's it. I have an average of 0.25 posts written in a span of 4 years. A quarter of a post.
Comparison
English is a secondary language for me. In my native language, I am relatively confident in how eloquently I can express myself. The truth is, in English, I can manage only a fraction of that. Reading books or others' blog posts immediately humbles me, and negatively influences my thinking. Instead of learning, I just become discouraged to try. In my mind, the peak rises higher. The summit pierces another sky, one I cannot even see.
This act of comparing ourselves to others hijacks our potential, constantly. Yes, it is painful sometimes to be behind, but what good does it do to be discouraged by it? Imagine a world in which everyone examines their peers closely, trying to outmatch their abilities when they least expect to. They all compete in silence, they all sabotage their peers in hopes of gaining an advantage. They never mention their failures, only talking in half-truths. All of it just so, in the end, they can tell everyone else that they were better.
In some way, this is our actual world. We do not want to be honest with eachother, we do not want to appear weak, but we expect to somehow become better—without the making of mistakes part. It is more and more the norm to flaunt your achievements while hiding your true self.
And I did that, too.
Do you care?
I am asking you, do you care about what I wrote here? Let's say you consider this post mediocre at best. What will you do next? Will you email me that I suck and ask me to stop wasting other people's time? Will you tell your friends about how mediocre this post was? I tend to believe you won't. In fact, you probably can recall some moments in which you searched for a solution on the internet only to be greeted by tons of SEO-driven articles that intentionally wasted your time. Or, you may recall a social media post in which a "news" article was shared which had a sentence of meaningful information stretched to a thousand words.
In reality, if you thought that this was mediocre, then you will most likely just move on with your life, and forget about it in a few minutes. However, what if you enjoyed it? Well, that is good, of course—it means that my post had meaning for someone, and I am happy with that.
Weighing these two outcomes, why would anyone ever be scared of failing? In a way, you can indeed fail too hard—you could make posts that might lead to you being arrested, for example. But, as long as you fail and do not affect anyone else, what is the downside? You get to learn to do that thing better in both cases, and, in time, your successes will outnumber your failures.
So, don't care.