You're always doing something wrong

If you do things, you're going to do things wrong. Such is the price you must pay to actually put things into the world.

My business partner Steve and I recently launched our first course: High Performance SQLite. It's a good course! So far we've made over 100,000 dollars, which is admittedly a ton of money.

And yet. And yet! We did a lot of things "wrong." We sent some emails too quickly and Gmail put us in the penalty box. We sent emails from the highperformancesqlite.com domain but maybe it would've been optimal to send them from aaronfrancis.com. There are some weird, intermittent iOS + Safari bugs with the video player we can't quite crack.

In launching the course we did a hundred things. We did maybe three of them wrong. I think about those three far more than the ninety-seven. That's not the ideal way to be, but it's how I am (for now?)

Anytime I make a YouTube video (which I do often), I inevitably get one the following comments:

• Why didn't you just [...]
• You did [...] wrong
• You should've used [...] instead
• Ugh, light mode
• PHP sucks
• Why are you so girly

I do things wrong. You're going to do things wrong. In pursuit of putting your work out in the world, you're going to do something that someone doesn't like or they deem stupid or wrong. Sometimes they're right! Sometimes they're hysterically wrong.

It doesn't matter.

You have to keep going. Being occasionally wrong is a small price to pay. Your alternative is to watch your life tick by as you're perfecting one last thing. And when you've finally perfected everything, you'll realize you haven't.

There's always something to fix. Always something to tweak. Always something to improve.

Work as hard as you can to make the best thing you can make and then let it go. Put it out there. Let people say what they will. You've done your job! Your job is to try really hard and to hit the publish button. That's it. Real artists ship.

The feedback will come!

It's foolish to close yourself off from all feedback and assume that only you know the one true way. It's equally foolish to take all feedback and assume everyone else is always right.

And, as our overwrought friend Shakespeare said, therein lies the rub. Listen to feedback but also... ignore the feedback? Ok guy.

If you listen to everything that everyone says, you'll be captured. You'll serve at the pleasure of the algorithm. You'll make generic, forgettable work. If you ignore everything everyone says you miss out on actual, valuable third-party perspective. Sometimes from people who have far more expertise than you. We should be so lucky to get that kind of feedback!

How you determine what to listen to and what to ignore is no easy question. A good heuristic is to listen to feedback from people you trust and ignore randos, unless the rando makes a point that is, prima facie, a good one.

No matter where the feedback comes from, it might sting. It always stings for me. I admire the people that don't care even a little bit. I also don't think I can be one of those people. I like pouring myself into my work. I am proud of the work I put out. I am not my work, but my work does contain little parts of me. I like it that way.

I can't tell you how to make it sting less, because I don't know.

I do know that almost every professional success I have I owe to the fact that I've made a habit out of publishing my work. And so I'll continue! Maybe I'll get better at shrugging off the mistakes, maybe not. If the price of crafting the life I want is being occasionally embarrassed, that's a price I'm willing to pay.