How to be a work in progress

My discomfort at doing anything before I’m ready, and how my newest project is designed to lean into this weakness

Ok, so allow me explain.

New parents are acutely aware of the developmental patterns of their children. When will baby be able to lift their head? When do they first stand up? When do they take their first step? When do they say their first word? There’s a whole industry around supplying parents with paraphernalia for recording “Baby’s First…” but aside from the hype, these milestones are an actual big deal in a child’s development.

So, imagine the worry of my parents when at the age of two, I had still not said a word. Nothing. Things got even more worrying at the age of three. Perhaps I was mute? No, doctors affirmed that nothing was wrong with my hearing, or my speech. Day after day, my parents (mostly Mom) waited anxiously for me to say something, anything.

One afternoon, we were hanging out in the back of my Dad’s convenience store. I am told I walked up to the customer side of the cashier, faced Dad where he was sitting behind the cash, and I stretched out my arm and said:

“Ti Prince Mild?”

Both my parents’ jaws dropped.

For one, I had just blurted out multiple words. Sort of a sentence actually… an exclamation? A question, really. Using Norwegian and English words. I somehow had managed to totally skip the whole “Baby’s First Word” thing, going straight for multilingual questions.

But the second thing was more shocking. Norwegian readers (if you’re out there) would already be clued into this, but what I had basically asked for was a ten pack of cigarettes. 😱

From all the time I had spent in Dad’s shop listening to customers come in and interact with my parents, I must have heard this question many times. My parents sense of relief was undoubtedly blended with horror as their four-year old child had just asked them for a pack of smokes 😅

This story would gain more significance as I became a young adult, trying to learn Dutch while studying in the Netherlands. I was super nervous about engaging any stranger unless I had rehearsed a whole interaction over and over again until it rolled off the tongue. While riding on my bike down one of the gorgeous grachten (canals) where no one could hear me, I’d whisper to myself these words and sentences that were foreign to my mouth. Spreek u engels? Ik will graag een stippenkaart, alsjeblieft. Mag ik een glasje water? In welke richting is de Dom? Dit is helemaal grappig te schrijven, en misschien ook te zeggen! (all mistakes in Dutch are mine)

I put in a ton of work on my own time because I wanted to sound really good when speaking Dutch. My mouth and throat (especially throat, actually) needed time to acclimatize to the sounds of Dutch. So much so that I delayed my “debut” speaking Dutch rather than speak it clumsily before I felt ready.

Call it perfectionism or just plain nerves, but this brute-force, practice-till-perfect method worked for me and my peace of mind.

I pinch myself every time I remember that I used to bike the gorgeous streets of Utrecht, daily. Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash

Whatever this tendency was, it returned to my life 15 years later when taking the writing course Write of Passage. Both David Perell (creator of WoP) and Salman Ansari (a WoP mentor) brought up this thing that Ira Glass (of NPR fame) had said once… about some kind of “gap”:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

Dang. Ira had put words to a phenomenon I only knew through a very primal and intuitive part of me. Dear reader, I think I’ve known about the “gap” since I was a baby. I’m not happy or sad about it, I’m just relieved that I’ve found a clue, a lever, to help me understand me better.

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One thing is knowing what excellence looks like, and that your skills won’t get you there. This requires acceptance and hard work towards the goal. This is what Ira is all about in his quote above.

Another thing is being frightened of looking like you’re fumbling, even though you got most of the skills to get you there. This is not a “gap” in skill. It’s more akin to stage fright, and feeling uncomfortable just thinking about everyone’s attention on you analyzing your every move. I know this is not true by a long shot, but it sure does feel real in my head. This requires a different type of work.

I’ve always admired start-up culture and their ability to “fail fast, fail often”. It is basically a call for better and more intentional opportunities for feedback loops to increase the fitness of a service or good. However, startups are still shrouded in mystery for most of the time until they’re ready to launch, similar to me.

Then I heard about this concept of “working with the garage door open”. Oh, I love this analogy. It has a more scrappy, workshop feeling to it. It calls for a more relaxed relationship with folks passing by. It’s fine that you look like you’re in the middle of something. It’s fine that you look like you’ve been at the bench for hours, and your space a bit messy. People love dropping by and looking at how things are made. Actually, so do I!

The more I thought about it, I realized I was missing out on many learning opportunities, relationship building moments, and better practice when I do my work in private. So it was time to address this pain point.

This is where my new project, the Minimum Viable Zettelkasten book, comes in. I decided to announce the project before anything was ready. Literally, nothing is ready except for the Gumroad landing page. But now it’s out there, and I am determined to get it done. People will be able to watch me complete it, and together we will learn from the process.

It’s gonna be an adventure, that’s for sure!

My first question for you, my wonderful readers who have made it this far into this newsletter, is this: I’m still debating how to work with the garage door open. In the spirit of building in public, here is what I’m thinking:

• Use Twitter for small, rolling updates. I want to give myself permission to post much more freely than I’m used to. Yay or nay?

• Choose where to roll out more substantial updates: on my website OR this substack OR a separate substack? Or a combo? If you have any thoughts on this, please send them my way!

• Update all my social media bios and website to reflect what I’m doing, and where.

Feel free to post your thoughts on this whole process in the comments, or hit reply to land straight in my inbox 📥

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Finally, I’d like to thank the trailblazers out there who have been great examples of building things in public! They have shown me that it isn’t as scary of a process as I thought it was. Two people in particular made an impact on me:

• Broccoli-wielding Kevon Cheung 🥦 (Twitter: @meetkevon) who runs a course on Building in Public and just launched a new book Find Joy in Chaos using the BIP methodology

• Writing group buddy Christin Chong who went from zero to ✨one✨ ebook in the span of a month!! She just finished her beautiful BIP book Debug your Meditation and seeing this happen live was so inspiring.

Thank you both for being positive examples 🙏

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If you’re in a comfortable spot, how are you finding ways to challenge yourself?

Give this letter a ❤️ if you enjoyed it (and do share the letter with friends who may appreciate it too!)

Until next time, stay safe and stay curious.

—Fei🪢