In my latest twist, I've been doing the
garbage post challenge. tl;dr, post 100 things publicly on the internet that include words in 30 days.
Stay your pitchforks a moment, hear me out.
My friend mentioned it to me in a letter (yes, a real letter with a stamp and everything, which makes this even more ironic) because we were writing to each other about imposter syndrome, perfectionism (which she identifies with strongly), doubts and fears of inadequacy related to showing up and taking up space, etc. See above for my FUD around podcasting.
Anyway I googled the GPC and listened to Simone Seol's podcast on it and went "ah, I must do this."
>>The point isn't to post actual garbage, to litter the internet with low quality dreck.<<
The point of the GPC is to
1) Get over perfectionism that stops you from putting your stuff out there
2) Decouple visibility from threat (aka to train your brain that visibility won't kill you / get you kicked out of the tribe)
3) Encourage you to build up a body of work
4) Reps reps reps
5) Spur creativity by decreasing the self-censoring, self-critic, etc that tends to keep people's reps low.
There's plenty of legit criticisms of the GPC and plenty of reasons not to do it, but it seemed like a good enough idea at the time and like the sort of thing with low consequences so I just said hell with it let's do it. Very 100 pots theory, which I've always been a fan of. I'm eight days in. Observations:
1) I already feel less precious about posting stuff.
2) It *feels* like I'm having more ideas and creativity.
3) I realize I had more classical perfectionist behavior patterns than I thought. I never identified with the perfectionist label but, um, maybe I was hilariously in denial about that.
4) I haven't died yet. Odd.
5) I'm spending more time looking at a screen and swiping, although my life isn't completely circled the drain. I'm definitely not going to do this any longer than 30 days (probably less, because I'll stop in 30 days or when I leave for my bike trip, whichever comes sooner).
6) I spend more time thinking "Oh hm I could take a picture of this and caption it and wouldn't that be cool" aka seeing my life through the lens of how I can present it and that's bad! Not how I want to live. My thoughts on this are 1) I can probably mitigate this effect with better narrowing or intentionality of the sorts of things I post, and 2) but whatever I'm going to stop soon and the damage will heal, and so far the positive effects of undermining perfectionistic tendencies are worth it.
A thought that is coming out of this is that what I produce and ship can be part of a quality cascade. I recognize that I had a very high and mostly unexamined standard for every thing I ever post anywhere, which I 100% of the time fell short of, and that made me feel bad. In doing the GPC I'm having the idea that it might be okay to have a system roughly like
1. social media posts are whatever, if I even choose to do so. I could definitely see being active on certain platforms only for specific periods of time, e.g. a month here, a season there, but mostly off.
2. Blog posts and podcast episodes are higher quality, but c'mon man it's free stuff and part of the whole purpose of blogging and podcasting is that it's a way to quickly get ideas out there in rough form. I don't think actualizing this would represent a decrease in the quality of my stuff... it would represent a decrease in how shitty I feel about it. From "Fuck that wasn't precisely right, time to work on the next piece and THIS ONE WONT SUCK SO BAD" to "Cool, good enough, time to go outside and play now."
3. Books etc are of the highest quality / time and attention spent to every aspect of it. (And even within the category of 'books' there could be a few scales of quality depending on what the content/format/etc is).