A pilot episode is the first in its series. A test for producers, money-men, and advertisers to see if an idea has traction. For as many as three-quarters of pilot episodes made, they are never even aired. From there, only a half are green-lit into full-on shows. The term pilot doesn’t really have anything to do with aviation or navigating a craft. It actually just comes from Greek and means something like a prototype. I first wrote a prototype for this blog in October of 2020.
I wrote three more articles on top of that and then quietly stopped. I eventually took them all down and sat on a blank website for several years. When my junior year of high-school ended and Summer began, I decided to pickup the website once more, but with a new philosophy in mind: be consistent.
The rest of this article lays out why consistency is so important and how I plan to keep it with this blog.
Quality or Quantity?
The discussion of quality versus quantity can be boiled down to perfection verses consistency. The former is the goal of the author, the latter is the goal of the reader. In creative work, perfection is chased to the expense of actually producing work.
When trying to start a new creative journey, a new skill or hobby, chasing perfection backfires. Hard.
Instead of incremental improvements over many, many, terrible iterations, a beginner chasing perfection sees no improvements over very little results. The fear of producing something bad ends up becoming a fear of producing anything at all.
Settling for quantity is a better strategy for sustainable and approachable work. It’s a way to avoid the fear of failure. If you put out something bad, who cares. If you put out something good, you’ll see it in the wild. By creating more over creating “perfect”, you’ll arrive at more chances to see your work flourish.
And this blog itself?
Truthfully, I still don’t know. I want to be consistent with my own work, but I don’t know how to do that, nobody really does. I’ll try to post articles at least twice a month based on whatever ideas I get next.
The way to do that effectively is through a simple and easy-to-use idea capture process. Apple Notes really works best… It works offline, syncs between Apple devices, and has a fairly robust folder structure.
I then take any ideas I think are decent and put them into a Notion database. Also, if I’m reading an article online, I can use the Notion web clipper to put it in the same place too.
From there, I can write a blog post about it. Easy as that. Until I forget about the whole thing a week later of course and try writing a blog post on Google docs.
Concluding Thoughts
This really is still a prototype. My only hope is that it lasts until I can iterate on it more. Take up consistency as a creating philosophy or create an idea-capture tool that works for you. Or don’t, it’s really up to you.