I won an award!
When I was still working as a smarty-pants computer scientist, I used to go to international conferences organized by the IEEE (the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a fancy organization in charge of standardizing such shit as wifi).
At these conferences, people eat a lot of cookies, drink buckets worth of coffee, and spend their time techno-babbling about such things as how to best teach robots to navigate on Mars, at the bottom of the ocean, or in a teenager's bedroom.
And most attendees also give talks to present their own scientific findings.
So, as a scientist myself, I had to give some talks too.
Now, the first time I gave one, I sucked. Not only did I forget half of the things I wanted to say, but I also sweated profusely and my stomach felt as if I had a wildly thrashing salmon in there.
No one was impressed—except the janitor, who had to mop up the puddle of sweat I left on the stage.
But by the time I gave my third talk at a conference, things had changed. People listened attentively to what I had to say and more than once someone approached me to say "Wow, I loved your talk!"
I even won a couple of minor awards at some of these conferences.
Now, before you think that means I'm a stellar public speaker, let me clarify that at a conference full of computer nerds the bar is so low that it might as well be at the bottom of the Mariana trench.
I wasn't stellar by any means. And no, it wasn't that I was presenting some world-shattering scientific discoveries either.
What made me stand out wasn't the quality of my research. It was the fact that during my talks I didn't use a PowerPoint covered in a wall of text, endless bullet points, and indecipherable diagrams. Instead, I used no text and just had some hand-drawn pictures projected behind me.
And these pictures weren't even drawn nicely. In fact, they were quite crude. I wasn't yet the (still bad) artist I am now 😂
But the thing is, at these conferences, no one else was doing talks the way I did.
So I got attention not by being an amazing scientist or an amazing speaker, but by doing my talks in new and exciting ways.
And when a couple of years later I embraced making it as an online writer, I basically tried to do the same.
I knew I had a slim chance of becoming the best writer out there. But I knew very well that I could write poorly, but do it in new and exciting ways.
And that's been my motto ever since.
So, if you yourself are trying to make a bit of a name for yourself too, I suggest you stop caring so much about the quality of your work and embrace just doing your work in new and exciting ways instead!
It might serve you better!
And if you want to know more about my thoughts on this for writers in particular, go ahead and read this week's story :-)
Forget Writing Well — Aim to Write Poorly in New and Exciting Ways Instead
It’s a competitive advantage
Writing is hard. Making people fall in love with your writing is harder. Paying the bills by just writing whatever the heck you want is damn near impossible.
And yet, we seem shocked — yes, shocked! — when after months and years of grinding on the writer’s treadmill, we are nowhere near making a living from our words alone.
It’s like every morning we …
Comics (and some thoughts) I’ve published recently:
Thanks for reading!
— David