Time To Quit?
Sorry to everyone who got excited at the title; I’m not hanging up my boots; many annoying topics still to come.
Today I went to check up on a blog I haven’t read for a while. (I know, I’m supposed to be avoiding the internet, but old habits die hard.) The blog is about as old as mine, and I have a list of blogs that are as old as mine and in similar niches to mine for comparison purposes.
Anyway, this blog was gone. It turns out that the guy behind the blog (don’t know him personally and I’ve never interacted with him) has just gone and deleted everything.
Sometimes, you’ll want to quit writing, quit having a website, whatever.
A lot of guys who read this site are in their early twenties. There are definitely going to be times when you want to delete everything, and to be honest, you’re going to write some things that you’ll look back on and cringe at. It’s inevitable.
But you shouldn’t do what the guy above has done. You shouldn’t delete everything.
Something else happened today.
I very rarely take websites down. I have a few that are nearly ten years old now. I don’t do anything with them, but they exist. Today, someone contacted me asking for help on one of these websites.
I haven’t touched that website in two years.
If you delete your website and quit writing altogether, you’ll never have that experience, and you don’t know where those experiences will lead you.
But What If I Change Over The Years?
That just means you’re interesting. It’s funny, because for years I put off writing under my own name. I did that because I couldn’t think of what I wanted people to associate me with. Was it writing? Business? Music? Languages? Weird Meditation Stuff?
I’ve had websites for all of those and more. I can’t even remember how many things I’ve done now. But I never felt like committing my identity to any of them.
That was stupid. Really, if I’d registered JamieMcSloy.com ten years ago and started writing about all the cool stuff I’d learned and nerdy stuff I’d tried out, it’d be an awesome site. Now I just have to allude to all that stuff – and now my website revolves around weird experiments with writing and business stuff, so it would have turned out alright in the end anyway.
People talk about building a brand… you are the brand. Anything less is going to be sub-par. I spent years not admitting my hobbies and ideas, and the outcome was subpar. Now I wish I hadn’t, even though I don’t think about those things much anymore. It’s a weird paradox.
What If My Stuff Is Terrible?
Your stuff is going to be great, but you’re probably going to think it’s terrible anyway. If you’re moving and progressing, then in five years’ time, you’re going to look back at the best work you’ve ever done today and think that it’s rubbish.
There are two things that you can do that don’t involve rage-quitting your hard work and deleting everything. Those things are 1) Go back and edit stuff, and 2) Live with and feed off your mistakes from the past.
Sometimes, I’ll look back at articles on this site. I’ll think they’re terrible. I don’t even want to say what I think about my writing from years back. On the one hand, it’s pretty embarrassing. On the other hand, it’s great because I’m better now than I was then, and there’s a clear link for everyone to see.
You’re the same. You’re going to make mistakes, no matter what kind of natural talent you have. Think of this as a great thing, because when you’re successful, people are going to say, “Yeah… but I could never do that. You have a talent for it,” or something similar. You’ll be able to point at your old work and say, “Not really… this is where I started.”
Or, you can go back and edit your work. At some point in the near future, I have to go through all of the older posts on this site. I didn’t bother putting in headings on some of my articles. I didn’t bother writing conclusions. I haven’t got a “P.S.” section on most articles.
There’s no hurry though.
What If I Do Something Really Stupid?
A lot of young guys whose blogs I read make some pretty terrible mistakes. I’ve made them too. (I’m sure that a lot of girls make similar mistakes, but I don’t read a lot of blogs for young girls, to be honest.)
Here are a few mistakes that I see regularly:
I was just watching a YouTube product review the other day for a supplement or something, and the guy doing it – who looked maybe twenty-five – was doing a great job, except for one thing: excess cursing. I hate to sound like a grumpy old prude of a man, but the more you load up your work with stuff like that, the more likely you are to want to disassociate yourself from it in the future. This guy said things like:
“Yeah man, these fucking pills are fucking awesome. They’re going to give you a shit-ton of muscle and you’re gonna get bitches just looking at you.”
I mean, it’s his video and all, but he’s probably going to think that that sounds stupid in five years. That’s if he doesn’t get it pulled up by an employer in the meantime.
You don’t have to be a puritan, but the language you’re going to use at twenty is going to be totally different from the language you use at thirty (unless something has gone very wrong.)
- Politics
I’ve said elsewhere on this blog that you need to avoid talking about politics and other divisive stuff unless you absolutely have to. A ton of young guys (and girls) seem to get caught up in chasing political trends, writing endless stuff about it, and being generally inflammatory to the other side of the argument.
I’m not saying you should be silent about issues you care about. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t care about politicians and societal stuff, but if you’re going to take part in that sort of thing, understand it has the potential to massively derail your life at a later stage. You need to think about whether the gain exceeds the risk (and I’d argue it doesn’t.)
There’ll be people who read the above two paragraphs and think that I’m “being a bitch” or “being scared” or whatever. There’ll be people who think that they need to fight their corner or think that they’re part of some massive revolutionary movement. Again, that’s cool… and I don’t really care if you think I’m hedging my bets or whatever. I’m just saying, it will have an effect later on, in all likelihood.
…Or you’ll just delete your blog when it turns out the next big revolution produces the same results as the last one when it becomes the status-quo.
Back To The Point – Final Thoughts
I took a little detour there because it was worth picking some examples as to why people delete their stuff. I realise though that there’s going to be an endless set of things I could use as examples like the above, so I’ll condense it into one thing:
Think about what you’re writing in the first place. Do a good job. Don’t buy into any one particular ideology too heavily, and keep your writing about yourself, what you’re doing and what you’re thinking.
You’re still going to say stupid things. You’re still going to get things wrong and make mistakes. That’s ok though. Providing you’re moving through life with some sort of improvement going on, your work is going to get better and as your direction changes, your skills will change to match that. It’s all part of an inevitable process.
Do the above, and deleting your website and quitting will probably not become a necessity for you like it does for a lot of people.