Stop Perfecting. Start Publishing.
The course I never released taught me more than the ones I did.
I have a skill. It’s one of the ones I’m most genuinely proud of, actually, and also one of the ones that has caused me the most trouble.
I follow rabbit holes.
An area catches my attention — really catches it, not just surface interest but the kind of deep pull that makes you cancel plans to read one more chapter, that has you lying awake connecting things, that turns a casual curiosity into a months-long immersion. I find the books, the experts, the adjacent disciplines. I research it properly, obsessively, with actual enthusiasm rather than the performative enthusiasm of someone going through the motions.
And then I know the thing. Genuinely, fluently, in a way that I could teach it, build a course around it, create something useful and lasting from it.
And then… nothing.
This has happened multiple times. Topics I’ve gone deep on. Material I’ve developed to the point where I could deliver it well — I know I could, because I’ve informally shared bits of it with students and watched it land. And yet somehow the formal thing, the packaged thing, the thing that exists in the world in a form that could reach more than the three people in the room on any given Tuesday afternoon — that thing never quite materialised.
The rabbit hole was real. The knowledge was real. The failure to publish was also real.
Here’s what I think was happening: the research phase is safe. You’re accumulating. Nobody can judge the accumulation because nobody can see it. You’re in a private world of learning and connecting, and in that world you’re good at this, you know what you’re doing, you’re moving forward.
Publishing is different. Publishing is the moment when what’s in your head has to become a thing in the world that other people will encounter and form opinions about.
The gap between the private accumulation and the public thing is where the paralysis lives.
There’s also a book club dimension to this, which I want to name.
I love the book club format. The idea of teaching through shared texts — not just “here’s my method” but “here are the books that shaped how I think, and here’s how to read them, and here’s what to do with what you find.” It’s a slower, richer kind of teaching. It respects the intelligence of the people you’re teaching. It builds something more durable than a quick-fix skill.
But it’s also a format that’s very easy to keep preparing. The reading list is never quite complete. There’s always one more book that should probably be in there. The structure is always almost right.
I’ve been preparing the book club version of three different courses in my head for years. None of them have been delivered.
Meanwhile, the version I actually delivered — imperfect, not fully structured, developed in real time in response to actual students in actual rooms — taught me things about the material that I could not have learned any other way.
This is the counterintuitive truth about publishing: it develops the work faster than not publishing.
You cannot fully know what you think until you’ve tried to explain it to someone who doesn’t share your assumptions. The gaps in your own understanding are invisible to you until a student asks a question that reveals them. The material that you thought was central turns out to be peripheral, and the thing you treated as a throwaway turns out to be the hinge everything else turns on.
You only discover this by publishing. By putting the thing in front of people and watching what happens.
The private rabbit hole gives you the raw material. The publishing is where the real development happens.
Social media has made this worse, in an interesting way.
The platforms have trained us to think in terms of the perfect post — the one that will perform well, that will be well-received, that justifies the time you spent making it by the numbers it gets. And this is precisely backwards for creative development. The things you post to meet algorithmic expectations are not the things that develop your thinking. The things that develop your thinking are the raw, imperfect, half-formed attempts to work something out in public.
The posts that have connected most with people, in my experience, are not the ones I spent the most time on. They’re the ones where I was genuinely working something out and happened to share it.
But that requires you to stop optimising before you’ve started building. To let the content be the thinking, rather than a presentation of thinking that’s already been done.
The practical change I’m trying to make is simple: reduce the time between having a thought and sharing it. Not eliminating the edit pass — I’m not advocating stream-of-consciousness publishing as a strategy. But compressing the cycle. From insight to draft in hours rather than weeks. From draft to published in days rather than months.
Because the feedback loop matters. The world’s response — even when it’s quiet, even when the numbers are small — tells you things about your own material that you cannot know in private.
The course I never released taught me exactly one thing: I should have released it.
Ship the thing. Learn from the world. Make the next version better.
What’s the thing you’ve been developing in private that deserves to exist in public? Not because it’s finished. Because it’s far enough along that someone could benefit from it, and the world’s response would make it better. Name it. Give it a deadline. This week, not next month.
CP52 Stage: Stage 5 — The Audience (finding your people)
Series: The Perfectionist Dilemma
Image note: A rabbit hole — literally, playfully. Or a bookshelf full of well-read books next to an empty publishing space.
