Nobody is waiting for your work (and thank god)

I was doing some research the other day on Instagram, because for the life of me I still can’t figure out how to get my message out there effectively.

I will, don’t you worry, but I write long-form essays, not short choppy viral clips, so I am still understanding how to best convey the message of iAlign in a way that connects with the modern scroll-er.

And when I need to improve on something, I never isolate in the shadows, trying to be perfect all on my own.

I go out and look for help.

As I’m doing this, a video slides across my screen of this music producer, Russ. If you’re not in the know, he’s a big producer with billions of streams. And he’s talking about a song he put out about four years ago that went platinum, hitting numbers most artists chase their whole lives and never touch.

And the thing he said next is what actually stopped me:

He explained that people still discover that song today, four years later, and message him saying things like “yo when did you make this, this is fire,” as if the song had just come out yesterday. Once again, it had tens if not hundreds of millions of streams already.

He admitted it drives him a little crazy, because not only does he think about that song every single day of his life, he probably hears a piece of it somewhere every single day, and it seems millions of other people do too.

So how on earth could somebody not know it exists?

And then he landed on the obvious thing that all of us seem to forget, which is that other people don’t live inside his head the way he does. They caught his song for a few seconds while scrolling, somewhere between a cooking video and their ex’s story, and then they went right on with their day.

He is the main character of his own life, but he is barely a background extra in theirs.

Now I’ll be honest with you, when I first heard that, it reminded me of my former self, and of a belief I carried around for most of my life.

“If you build something genuinely good and impactful, people will come and appreciate it and use it.”

That is what I grew up believing. It is romantic, and it is nice.

It is also bullshit.

Because that belief quietly sells you on a fantasy. It tells you that if you were to write the most beautiful essay, or build the most incredible invention, you could keep it tucked away on your laptop or sitting on your kitchen table, quietly working on it and polishing it in private until it becomes so perfect that nobody could possibly put it down or resist it.

And then, so the story goes, the moment one person finally got their hands on it, it would be so undeniably great that they would pass it along to everyone else in their life, who would pass it along to everyone in theirs, until every last person it could help was using it.

It is a beautiful little fantasy.

It is also the exact thing that keeps your best work collecting dust.

Let me show you what I mean with something small from my own life. There is a little sushi spot right next to my apartment, and it is hands down my favorite one in the entire city (it’s called Atami Sushi on Lombard, go check it out. It’s run by a wife and husband, she does all the waiting and he makes all the sushi, it’s great).

If you asked me for a recommendation I would send you there without a second of hesitation (as I just did). And yet, if I am being completely truthful with you, I have never once thought about that place on my own when I wasn’t standing directly in front of it.

It isn’t because I don’t love it, because I really do. It’s simply that I am busy being the main character of my own life, in the exact same way that you are in yours, and in the exact same way that every person on your email list or in your audience is in theirs.

No one is sitting at home refreshing the page and waiting on your work.

And that is not a knock on them at all, it is just the honest reality of being a human being with your own life playing out at full volume.

Now I can already hear a few of you, because I have said this same thing to myself a hundred times over.

“Okay Flint, that’s fine for the stuff that doesn’t matter, but mine actually needs to be good. I’m not about to put out garbage.”

And I hear you completely, because neither am I.

But here is the part that finally set me free.

When people listen to the bad songs, they just move on with their life and go listen to other ones. Even if it’s so bad it pisses them off, they forget about it because they have to get to work or hit a deadline, or someone walks by and they just lose their train of thought.

Think about your favorite music artist: I can basically guarantee you they have some shit songs that you press next on every time they come up. And yet you still listen to their good ones.

Or about Tiger Woods, arguably the greatest to ever pick up a golf club. There is an interview where someone asks him how many shots he actually flushes in a round, out of the seventy or eighty that he takes, meaning how many come off exactly the way he pictured them in his mind.

His answer was two. Maybe.

Ninety-eight percent of the greatest golfer alive’s shots were not the shot, and he still went on to win just about everything there was to win.

So sit with that for a second, because it quietly takes the whole story apart.

The bar was never to make the perfect thing. The bar is to intentionally set yourself up as best as you can in the limited time you have, to take the shot, to miss most of them the way every single person who has ever done anything great also misses, and then to keep moving.

Because not every shot is going to be on a highlight reel. But if you don’t take any shots, you have no highlight reel at all.

You do not need the next piece of your project to be the shot. You just need to fucking hit it.

And I’ll tell you exactly what happens when you wait for perfect instead, because I have lived inside this loop for months at a time. As I can basically guarantee that you have as well.

You don’t publish the work or ship the code or the project or have the conversation. And because you don’t publish or ship it or speak up, you never get that small piece of feedback or momentum that would have made the next one better.

And because nothing got better, that imaginary crowd in your head gets a little louder, so you retreat a little further, and another quiet week goes by where the best version of your work lived and died inside your own skull.

That is the trap, and notice that the way out of it is not a better idea or a more polished draft.

The way out is the exact thing I was doing at the very start of this email, researching Instagram. Because I’m pretty shit at the social media game still, even after easily 1,000 videos posted.

I am not hiding and trying to figure it all out alone in the dark.

Don’t you for a moment think that I couldn’t rewrite this brief essay 100 more times. There are pieces of it that I feel aren’t great. But here it is, in your inbox or on your screen because I quickly researched, iterated, asked for help, and let the imperfect version of my message live in the world while I work on making it better in real time.

That is the whole game.

And it brings me to your real issue. It’s that the thought of being seen as being imperfect or bad at what you do leads you to overthink, seek out distraction instead of action, and then make no or very little progress.

Because the moment you actually put the thing out into the world, you lose the safety of “it’s not ready yet.”

It is out there now, with your name attached to it, and people can finally look at it, which means they can finally look at you. They might think it’s stupid. They might decide you are a fraud. They might think “who does this person think they are,” which is very likely the exact voice you have already rehearsed in your own head a few hundred times.

So you keep it tucked away where it stays perfect and unjudged forever, and where it also helps precisely nobody.

But being seen was always the entire point. Your work cannot reach or change or help a single human being while it is hidden down in the foundation, protecting you from a crowd that, as we have already covered, is not even watching yet.

The fear of being seen and the desire to build something that actually matters are roads pointed in opposite directions, and you only get to walk toward one of them.

I know which one I am choosing, imperfect essays and all.

So here is my one small ask for you. Hit reply and tell me the thing you have been sitting on: the post, the project, the offer, the piece of writing you keep quietly polishing off in the shadows.

I read every single response that comes into my inbox personally, and there is very little in this world that I enjoy more than watching someone finally put out the thing they have been hiding down in the foundation.