TJL #24: Obscurity is good
Tried building Wedje but didn't get so far
Welcome back to Today Jan Learned (TJL) #24. In this newsletter I share the best of what others have figured out already. To get the full TJL experience, subscribe today.
What you might’ve missed:
TJL #23: Building Wedje (part 2): In my previous post I created an initial prototype which went well.
Today I was struggling a bit with the app. I had trouble separating the routing logic from the data persistence logic because they are both new to me. So that’s why today I want to share something different, something about obscurity and fame.
In this post:
Obscurity is good
Why I am struggling with the app
Obscurity is good
This comes from the book Steal Like An Artist:
I get a lot of e-mails from young people who ask, “How do I get discovered?”
I sympathize with them.
There is a kind of fallout that happens when you leave college. The classroom is a wonderful, if artificial, place: Your professor gets paid to pay attention to your ideas, and your classmates are paying to pay attention to your ideas. Never again in your life will you have such a captive audience.
Soon after, you learn that most of the world doesn’t necessarily care about what you think. It sounds harsh, but it’s true. As the writer Steven Pressfield says, “It’s not that people are mean or cruel, they’re just busy.”
This can be a tough pill to swallow once you exit academia. Suddenly no one really cares about you anymore.
What you might not realise is that this is a good thing. Why? Because you only want people paying attention after you’ve done a good job. This also means that there is little pressure to keep on churning out the same stuff when you are unknown.
This, in turn means artistic freedom of expression! There is no pressure to maintain a certain image. No one to distract you. No pay-check that is dependent on what you produce. No stockholders and investors. Just freedom. This freedom is something you’ll never get back when people do start paying attention, especially after you start taking their money. Enjoy your obscurity while it lasts.
It is very difficult to predict what people like. So my advice to you (and myself) is just to keep churning out things to figure out both what your audience wants you to write and what you want to write.
For example, I wrote a popular blog post about Regex which you can find here. When I put it out there it exploded and got 30.000 views in a matter of weeks. I never expected this kind of success, heck, I even didn’t finish a section of the blog because I was so fed up with it! If you pay really close attention you’ll know which section I’m talking about. Yet despite that, people loved it!
I’ll go enjoy my obscurity now while I tell you all about my struggles with building an app in react-native!
Why I am struggling with the app
I did try to build out Wedje today but failed. When I wanted to start coding at 8pm or so it all felt so complex and my brain just got overloaded with all the complexity that I have yet to implement. I have to think both about the navigation and the data structures and how to persist that at the same time, this of course is a recipe for disaster.
What I did wrong:
Started too late (I work best in the morning)
Unclear separation between routing and data
There are several ways I can move forward:
Start earlier (going to do that for sure)
Start using Redux for my state management
Work on the routing logic first
Work on the data persistence logic first
Convert to a single page app
My best bet (I think) is to make a new branch in my project and try out any of these. It doesn’t really matter which one. I think I’m going to try and fix the navigation and routing first. Then the data. And then try to put two and two together.
Recap
Enjoy your obscurity while it last, and, uh… start earlier tomorrow.
That’s it! Enjoyed this? Feel free to subscribe! Hated this? Feel free to subscribe and let me know what to improve!
As always, you can find me on my website janmeppe.com or on Twitter at @janmeppe.
P.S. If anyone wants me to write about Roam Research or Zettelkasten. Reach out to me.
Previous TJLs
Read my previous TJLs by following on the links down below: