How to win friends and influence people with an iPad in a coffee shop

<i>If I was writing a book, I'd do a terrible job, because my nose for what people want is broken. When I write essays, I don't care, I write everything and I let Hacker News and Twitter sort out the wheat from my chaff.</i><p>Personally I think this is a bad idea, because what is popular on HN rarely correlates with what I consider to be quality writing. If your goal is just to get an article on HN, that can be done pretty easily: give it a provocative title, discuss one of a handful of topics (e.g., node.js, Clojure, Scala, Rails, Apple/iOS, etc.), and make it easily skimmable within 30-45 seconds.<p>If HN popularity was a reliable metric for quality, TechCrunch would deserve a Pulitzer. If you want to write short pieces that attract the interest of a programmer while their code compiles, HN is a decent metric. If you want to write something with lasting meaning or value, it is not.<p>(Obviously, that isn't to say that <i>nothing</i> on HN has lasting meaning or value -- just that the correlation between lasting quality and HN popularity is weak, at best.)

Love this pair of observations about how books get judged by their worst parts, but collections of online posts for their best:<p><i>Another problem with a book is that it's One Big Thing. Very few book reviews say "Chapter two is a gem, buy the book for this and ignore chapter six, the author is confused." Most just say "He's an idiot, chapter six is proof of that."</i><p>...versus...<p><i>Thanks to Twitter and Hacker News and whatever else, if you write a good thing, it gets judged on its own. You can write 99 failures but you are judged by your best work, not your worst. </i><p>Microcontent (and even decontextualization) for the win.

Well said, I agree completely. Having lectured on "How to Start" - my thesis is basically "Start small." If you can't start it at a certain size, start smaller, and if you still can't start it a certain size, go smaller still. In fact, it turns out there is nothing too small to start. The act of starting and doing at even the tiniest scale is the key. So if you are a designer, design or redesign the paperclip. If you are a programmer, make something tiny, a single function app, or site. And yes, like Mr. raganwald has discovered, if you are writer, start small. A sentence, a tweet, a poem, or a blog. Start small, take small steps, make small bets, but work long. When your competitors have finished, work on, when your peers have retired, work on, and slowly, piece by piece, amazing things happen. I believe it's the law of making things. And I believe it's almost Newtonian in it's truth.

Mm. I agree in principle, but i have always thought that the "just do it" (for whatever value of "it" you choose) is a rather glib assertion.<p>The process of doing isn't sufficient in of itself to improve. The key to improvement is feedback and self-analysis with an eye towards better quality. Raganwald admits as much. Sure doing is a prerequisite to feedback, but the important part is how you learn from yourself and others, and how you go about that process.

I'm torn. I recently started my own site and have been following the 'write every day' protocol. I'm not always in the mood and don't always have special inspiration, but I maintain the schedule.<p>A friend recently resurrected and redesigned (after 2 year hiatus) his site and it looks amazing. His writing is amazing. Problem is that the site is complete and he hasn't written one post because of his perfectionist nature.<p>Is there a right answer here? What is better: continuously writing in the name of honing skills or withholding talent in the pursuit of perfection?<p>Another blogger advised the former, saying that as far as blogs go your mediocre content will simply be forgotten and a really good piece may make HN and go viral. In other words, just do as raganwald suggests and be prolific before all else. There is no real downside to maintaining a schedule and just going for it.<p>For beginners like myself I tend to agree with that statement - practice, hone your skills, develop your methods and thought processes and continue writing every day.

So good. I've basically pursued this strategy for the last year and it's worked out really well for me. You often have no idea what people are going to find valuable - so produce more and let the people decide.

This is the same advice given by every good photographer. David Bailey once said, the easiest way to double the quality of your portfolio is to throw away half of it. When you see an exhibition by a top photographer, you might be looking at the best 50 out of 50,000 images. But you have to be shooting, all the time, to pull this off.

He writes essays on an iPad?

Write.

After his point in paragraph three, I realized this guy's just writing what amounts to highbrow SEO-filler, so I stopped reading.<p>Yes, quality matters. But quality isn't measured by how "polished" an essay is. That is a gross misunderstanding of quality-in-writing... QUALITY REQUIRES HAVING SOMETHING WORTH SAYING, and saying it concisely.