The fear of putting things out

There is a specific kind of discomfort that comes just before you publish something you made.

It doesn’t matter much what it is. A tool, a post, a paper, a linkedin post about something you’ve done, will do or will attend. In the seconds, and for me minutes, before I press the button, there’s a version of the thought that goes: maybe I should wait a bit longer. Maybe it needs one more pass. Maybe the wording isn’t right. Maybe i’m missing something super important and super obvious

That thought is almost always a delay tactic. The thing is ready. You just don’t want people to see it yet.

The awkwardness of social media

Posting about your own work on LinkedIn has a particular feeling of awkwardness for me.

Part of it is the format. Social media rewards a kind of confidence that feels dishonest to performance. The posts that do well tend to have a clear arc: here is the problem, here is what I did, here is what it proved. Clean, straightforward, optimistic. And read in less than 10 seconds. Which is fine, but it doesn’t leave much room for the more honest version, which is: here is something I made, I think it might be useful, I’m not entirely sure, I feel slightly strange asking you to look at it.

Part of it is also that you can see the engagement, and especially the absence of it. With a paper, once it’s published, you mostly stop watching. Although many sites now have the live counters of citations, views, and downloads. With a LinkedIn post, you can watch the view count in real time. I understand, your reach is what’s importnat about papers, posts and ideas.

What actually happens when you put it out

Here is the honest version of what I’ve observed, across papers, tools, posts, and pitches. And I think this video I watched ages ago sums it up pretty well.

Most people don’t notice. The audience you imagined reading it, the one whose reaction you were fearing the most, mostly don’t even spend a second thinking about your post. A good friend of mine always told me that you are one drop in the ocean of posts. And he’s right but doesnt make my drop less important to me. Balance between self conciousness and getting it out there. That’s whats important.

And hey, some people do notice. And those tend to be the right people. The researcher who had the same problem as you and found CapiPy before they were about to build something themselves. The PhD student who saw a post about inseit at a moment when they were thinking about whether a startup was a real option. The founder who reached out after a talk because something in it matched their experience.

You cannot find those people without putting the thing out. They cannot find you. The only way the connection happens is through the exposure you were trying to avoid.

Did it get easier?

Somewhat. The fear doesn’t disappear, but it becomes more familiar, and you get better at recognising it for what it is: just you worrying. A sign that you care about the work, not a sign that the work isn’t ready.

This blog posts are my try at getting managing and getting used to that fear. I’m just making them public now, but some of them were written long ago. The discomfort before publishing is basically constant across all of them. The answer to it is the same each time: do it anyway, see what happens.

So far, nothing bad has happened.