The phrases “growth mindset” and “minimum viable product” certainly carry a whiff of winking irony from a personal perspective. They definitely both fall into that category of notions which may once have been good ideas but now are clichéd, overused, and warped into handy catchphrases somewhat devoid of meaning. Perhaps this post is an attempt to reclaim some inner seed of meaning back; one that celebrates just making a start somehwere.
At my new job, my current manager (who I’ve now known for several years and intentionally joined in this role) has started up a new mantra: “Everything is a work in progress, and that’s okay.” It feels like synchronicity that this has come up at work when I was already on a journey of re-learning that it’s all right to kick off with a not-entirely-polished product.
Previous attempts at resurrecting my own personal website after a considerable hiatus tripped up somewhere early in 2019 and weren’t structurally sound enough to hold up against a storm of personal and professional stressors that emerged across the subsequent years of 2020-2024. I had in mind some kind of soaringly elaborate structure and design that got partially built and easily abandoned because I had just set the bar far too high, forgetting that the design and technical challenges really just were beside the point.
So for this iteration I have aimed considerably lower, meditating on the fact that back in 2001, when I first got the notion to create my own weblog at the broadcast exhortation of the late great Chris Locke, I just threw together any old markup and got started, figuring it out and refining it and improving it as I went along. It provided me with numerous autodidactic alleyways down which I hunted and learned about Python, Postgres, hosting DNS servers and web servers alike. I had no real big picture end goal in mind, other than to express myself.
So here I am now, staring down middle age instead of early adulthood, and going back to the beginning. So far it’s been a pretty gratifying place to be.
This morning I was idly thinking while I brushed my teeth about the writing process and wondering if the author of the novel I’m currently reading had the whole thing plotted out ahead of time or just made it up as they went along. My thoughts naturally turned to a personal goal of getting back into fiction writing and maybe writing a story or a novel that other people would read and enjoy someday. I was filled with a familiar but as yet unconquerable anxiety and assumption that I would just never be able to come up with a good story, have something interesting to say. But for the first time ever in my long life of amateur authorship, I thought to myself, “I will write a bad story.”
I was buoyed by an immediate intense, almost hysterical feeling of joy and relief at the notion. I had finally beaten the anxiety.
I will write a bad story.
I will start a blog that’s just barely enough.
But I will do.