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This is Five-Minute Friday on The Normal Anxiety of Content Creation.
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It has been two years since my first book, Deep Learning Illustrated, was published. The years I spent writing the book were filled with persistent darkness and anxiety.
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I had a sense of dread that when readers got their hands on the book, they would find catastrophic errors or humiliating gaps in my writing. I feared that some unidentified issue or collection of issues with the book would be so massive that the book would be perceived of as a joke or that I would be perceived of as a fraud. I’ve learned since that such fears are common amongst authors, particularly whilst writng their first book.
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In the latter part of the writing process, my anxiety got worse, it was multiplied by the reality that I’d passed the manuscript submission deadline that I had contractually agreed to with the publisher, Pearson. It turns out that late submissions of books are common and so the publisher was not only unsurprised by the lateness, but also not particularly stressed about it. Ok, one huge sigh of relief. But a much bigger concern to come about how the book itself is going to be received by the public when it’s released.
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Once the manuscript was submitted, I steeled myself with a growth mindset that even if the book does turn out to be an abject flop, I would work as objectively as I could with the critical feedback so that I could iterate and improve for a second book. I believed that, no matter how poor my first book is or even my second or my third book is, that if I was committed to the process of writing and iterative improvement, my tenth book would inevitably be at least not bad.
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When the book was released and became an instant #1-bestseller in several Amazon categories in the US, I was surprised and absolutely delighted. I can still scarcely believe it today. On Amazon, now the book has a 4.5-star rating from hundreds of reviews. Six international translations have been released and some of those have themselves done well, such as the Traditional Chinese version that was released just a couple of months ago and itself became a #1-bestseller in Taiwan.
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I’m telling you this today because I’ve seen several recent LinkedIn posts from content creators and as well as from others making strides on a new challenge who have felt overwhelmed by anxiety. Hopefully this episode illustrates that the way you feel about your own work — particularly prior to publishing — can be vastly disconnected from the reality. Indeed I’m starting to get the impression that it is normal to feel overwhelmed by anxiety anytime that you’re creating something for public consumption. Hopefully if you’ve been going through something similar yourself, hearing this will bring comfort — maybe even a tiny reduction in the anxiety itself.
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The main point is: keep going. Whether it’s prose or code, keep publishing. If in the end, one piece of content, one piece of software doesn’t hit the mark as you anticipated, appreciate that not every negative piece of feedback is accurate while the feedback that is accurate can be leveraged to iterate objectively and improve. What matters most is that you keep going.
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All right-y, that’s it for today. Keep on rockin’ it out there folks and catch you on another round of SuperDataScience very soon.
