I’m very bad at writing and reaching out to people, and this is the single reason stopping me from making an impact in this space. I have been trying hard to figure out why I’m bad at writing and talking and reaching out to people for a very long time (even writing this shortform was difficult for me) and here are some hypothesized reasons why:
I’m not a native English user
I’m perfectionist about writing style, trying to make it so that the writing style is “native” enough according to my intuition
I haven’t talked to English people that much so I don’t really know the conversational style
I haven’t talked much to people in general so I don’t even know which information in particular is important to deliver
I’m generally very anxious about actively talking to people I don’t know
I procrastinate a lot recently
Having written the reasons out I expect them to be a one-time issue, and that someone helping me out to resolve these issues has a chance of being counterfactually impactful without spending much time
I relate to this. (I’m also not a native English user! and I feel we are similar in the other points too.)
For me, a mix of the following made me slightly better at writing: reading Babble, reading about importance of deliberate practice, writing about unimportant things (high stakes writing would give me way too much pressure at the beginning that procrastination immediately kicks in), and sometimes being confident enough that I think even writing a poor version of the thing I wanted to communicate is a net positive to the person I’m talking to or society in general (compared to predictably procrastinating if I try to improve the writing)
For reaching out to people, i’m not too sure which kind of reaching out do you mean.
I mean reaching out to strangers in general. And also, I expect (75%) the problem to be solved by the time I reach 10 cycles in the “actively reaching out to a stranger” <-> “hearing from them” feedback loop.
Writing is like a muscle that you have to train. Don’t wait for the perfect opportunity to write. Start writing now, so that when the perfect opportunity arrives, you already have the skill.
Thinking about the right topic, worrying about the audience—those are just ways to procrastinate. Forget it. Write about anything that is on your mind now. Someone may like it, most people probably won’t; that’s life. Keep doing things and gaining experience. When you get the experience, then perhaps consider the audience and the topic.
There is no reason why you shouldn’t write both in English and your native language. (Two different blogs, perhaps.)
Imagine an ideal reader, and write for them. If someone matches this profile, maybe they will get lucky and find your article. You can’t make everyone happy anyway.
I’m very bad at writing and reaching out to people, and this is the single reason stopping me from making an impact in this space. I have been trying hard to figure out why I’m bad at writing and talking and reaching out to people for a very long time (even writing this shortform was difficult for me) and here are some hypothesized reasons why:
I’m not a native English user
I’m perfectionist about writing style, trying to make it so that the writing style is “native” enough according to my intuition
I haven’t talked to English people that much so I don’t really know the conversational style
I haven’t talked much to people in general so I don’t even know which information in particular is important to deliver
I’m generally very anxious about actively talking to people I don’t know
I procrastinate a lot recently
Having written the reasons out I expect them to be a one-time issue, and that someone helping me out to resolve these issues has a chance of being counterfactually impactful without spending much time
I relate to this. (I’m also not a native English user! and I feel we are similar in the other points too.)
For me, a mix of the following made me slightly better at writing: reading Babble, reading about importance of deliberate practice, writing about unimportant things (high stakes writing would give me way too much pressure at the beginning that procrastination immediately kicks in), and sometimes being confident enough that I think even writing a poor version of the thing I wanted to communicate is a net positive to the person I’m talking to or society in general (compared to predictably procrastinating if I try to improve the writing)
For reaching out to people, i’m not too sure which kind of reaching out do you mean.
I mean reaching out to strangers in general. And also, I expect (75%) the problem to be solved by the time I reach 10 cycles in the “actively reaching out to a stranger” <-> “hearing from them” feedback loop.
Writing is like a muscle that you have to train. Don’t wait for the perfect opportunity to write. Start writing now, so that when the perfect opportunity arrives, you already have the skill.
Thinking about the right topic, worrying about the audience—those are just ways to procrastinate. Forget it. Write about anything that is on your mind now. Someone may like it, most people probably won’t; that’s life. Keep doing things and gaining experience. When you get the experience, then perhaps consider the audience and the topic.
There is no reason why you shouldn’t write both in English and your native language. (Two different blogs, perhaps.)
Imagine an ideal reader, and write for them. If someone matches this profile, maybe they will get lucky and find your article. You can’t make everyone happy anyway.
tl;dr—it’s practice first, success maybe later
Do you consider yourself good at writing in your native language? If so, I’d encourage you to maybe try out this technique I advocated for.