Several years ago I came up with the concept of prefering to be publicly wrong than privately right. I registered the domain publiclywrong.com (which I still own) and I used it for a couple of weeks as my personal blog. I loved the idea and still do but I haven’t lived up to it. I wasn’t ready to be publicly wrong on a practical and not only theoretical level. The same thing has been going on with my desire to put my code into open source - at the end I want it to be perfect before I publish it, and it’s never perfect.

Yesterday I read a post by Jeff Atwood site and one part struck me as especially insightful:

It is just not a native part of the Microsoft .NET culture to make things open source, especially not the things that suck. If you are afraid the things you share will suck, that fear will render you incapable of truly and deeply giving back. The most, uh, delightful… bit of open source communities is how they aren’t afraid to let it “all hang out”, so to speak.

So whenever I have the slightest doubt that something I did actually sucks - that never sees the light of the day. Is this an optimal attitude to take? That will depend on the circumstances. But I think that for blogging and open source software, the time I have available for these things and what I want to achieve with them, that attitude is suboptimal. Perfect is the enemy of good as the saying goes and I thought that I have understood and accepted this but apparently there is still a way to go.

Case in hand: I have been stuck on a new post for a couple of days out of deep desire to get it “right”. The post is about reader apps and services and what I want from them. Between Instapaper, Pinboard, Kindle and Evernote I have too may services, each offering just a part of the experience that for me comes down to reading and annotating. That plus what I would like to have is all that the post should have said but I got stuck in analysis paralysis.

There is a concept of “strong opinions weakly held” that I first read about years ago in a post also by Jeff Atwood. At the time it struck me as a post-factum rationalization of just talking out of your ass and have the chips fall where they may (biased by my opinion that lot of Jeff’s opinions are of that particular quality). But now I’m thinking that what I quoted above regarding the open source communities is essentially the same what Jeff and many others have been doing for years: not being afraid to letting it “all hang out”. It doesn’t matter if it’s code or words or art or whatever it is. It’s about not being afraid to be publicly wrong.

Last modified on 2013-03-23