On building in public and staying sane

There's a version of "building in public" that's really just performance anxiety dressed up as transparency. You share polished updates, manufactured breakthroughs, a curated view of progress. The work looks alive, but it's staged.

I've been trying to do something different here.

What I actually mean by it

When I say I'm building in public, I mean posting the thing before I've figured out whether it's good. Writing the post before I know how it ends. Pushing the project live before it's done. Not as a strategy — just because that's when I actually have something to say.

The filter most of us apply — "is this worth sharing?" — tends to kill things before they can breathe. We optimize for completeness and end up never starting.

The most useful thing you can share is the thing you're unsure about.

The uncomfortable middle

The part nobody talks about: it's genuinely uncomfortable. You share something half-baked and then you have to live with it. Someone might read it. They might have thoughts. You might have been wrong.

That discomfort is the point. It creates accountability without requiring an audience. Even if nobody reads this, I wrote it and posted it before I was ready, and that's the practice.

Staying sane about it

A few things that help:

• Separate the making from the sharing. Write because you want to think. Share because others might find it useful. These are different motivations.
• Don't track metrics on your own thoughts. Page views on a personal essay are noise.
• Give yourself permission to be wrong. This isn't a press release.

I don't know if this approach produces better work. But it produces more of it, and more honestly, and I think that's the thing worth optimizing for right now.