Start Publishing Ugly.
Stop polishing your content start embracing messy!
Most of what feels like refining and polishing content before publishing is anxiety in disguise.
The reader will never see the difference between your fifth draft and your seventh. Publishing ugly is the cheapest writing skill nobody teaches.
I have an article in my drafts folder that I started three weeks ago. It has been 90 per cent done for two weeks. I have spent that time picking at the last 10 per cent, which really doesn’t exist. I know why I’ve not published it, and it’s nothing to do with grammar or phrasing… it’s all to do with confidence… I don’t think you’ll like it!
My theory, based on these years of writing daily, is that polishing past 80 per cent adds time without adding value that the reader can see. The article that goes out today reaches readers. The one still in drafts next week reaches no one.
This article is easy to write and publish, it’s not controversial. I’ll “knock it out” in 20-30 minutes, run it through Grammarly to remove the most obvious faux pas, and then hit publish.
That is how it should be in general.
Why we polish
I feel the honest answer is that polishing feels like work. It feels productive. You can sit at your desk for two hours moving commas around and feel like you have done something, when in fact you have done almost nothing, the reader will notice. (Yes, I just added that “,” it wasn’t there 2 minutes ago…would you have noticed?)
Most of what feels like polishing is a form of anxiety in disguise. The article is done. You are not done with the article, because the article being done means you have to publish it. So you find another sentence to fiddle with.
I know this because I have done it for 20 years. I am not above it.
What “ugly” actually looks like
Ugly is publishing the article at 80 per cent. Not at 100. The last 20 per cent is mostly things the reader cannot see.
Ugly is leaving a sentence that is slightly off because the next sentence is good. Ugly is publishing with a typo that someone will point out in the comments. Ugly is admitting in the middle of the article that you do not quite know what you mean yet. Ugly is keeping the line you nearly cut because it sounded too much like you.
The articles that have performed best were almost never the ones I worked the longest on. The ones I sat on for a week trying to “get right” often read as if a committee wrote them. The ones I sent out at the moment I finished more often read as if a person wrote it.
No matter how good your content is or how valuable an article is, there will always be people who find flaws in it… it’s a fact of life. Brush off any criticism, and if you really feel it comes into the community, and share it with us, we love to laugh and people like that!
What to do about it
Four things if you find yourself polishing past the point of usefulness:
Set a hard time limit. An article gets one r two hours or a couple drafts. Whichever comes first, you publish. (You aren’t writing a Pulitzer piece!)
Notice the second-guess moment. When you read a line for the fourth time, you are not making it better, you are making it less yours. Put it down.
Publish first, fix later if you must. Medium and substack lets you edit an already-published article. A typo at 11am can be fixed at 4pm. An unpublished article can’t be fixed at all.
Treat each article as one of many. The one you are polishing today is not your masterpiece. It is one brick in the wall. Polish the wall, not every brick.
I do still polish. I tweaked this article before publishing it, including the line you just read. The point is not to publish first drafts. The point is to notice when polishing stops being editing and starts being procrastination.
Try This Today
Get an idea for an article. Your job now is to write around 300 words, when you get to 300 words or 30 minutes. finish it. Quickly check grammar and make sure there are no huge errors. and publish. It should take no longer than 40 minutes in total.
Just a reminder, paid subscribers now get access to 2 communities: a Substack Growth community and my Systematic Writer community, along with access to ALL my courses and books.
Maybe those 20 years of polished content brought you loyal readers. Since they trust you, they get adapted not to notice your less polished content now..