Fear of Shipping: Conquering Imposter Syndrome

I have drafted this blog post five times. I deleted the first four versions. I almost didn't write it at all.

Why? Because a voice in my head—a very persuasive, sneering voice—said: "This is stupid. Everyone knows this already. Who are you to give advice? You're barely figuring it out yourself. You are a fraud, and if you publish this, everyone will see it."

Hello, my old friend, Imposter Syndrome.

It is the silent epidemic of the creator economy. It hits builders the hardest. Because when you build something—whether it's an app, a blog, or a company—you are putting a piece of yourself into the world to be judged.

You are standing up and saying, "I made this. I think it has value."

That is an incredibly arrogant and terrifying claim to make. And your brain, trying to protect you from social rejection, screams at you to sit down and shut up.

The Expert Fallacy

We think we need to be "experts" before we can ship. We look at the titans—Musk, Zuckerberg, the Senior Principal Engineer at Google—and we think they have it all figured out. We think they have a special manual that we lost.

Here is a secret I have learned from being in rooms with very successful people: No one knows what they are doing.

I mean it. Everyone is figuring it out in real-time. The world changes too fast for experts to exist.

The only difference between the "expert" and the "fraud" is that the expert ships anyway. They have made peace with the uncertainty.

The Gap

Ira Glass has a famous quote about "The Gap." He says that as creatives, we have good taste, but our skills aren't good enough to match our taste. So everything we make disappoints us.

I feel this every time I write code. I can imagine the perfect, elegant architecture. But what comes out of my fingers is messy and buggy.

Imposter syndrome thrives in this gap. It tells you that because your work isn't perfect, it is worthless.

But you can only close the gap by shipping. You have to ship the bad work to get to the good work. You have to write the bad loop to learn how to write the optimized list comprehension.

Ship for One Person

The way I get over the paralysing fear is to lower the stakes.

Don't build for "The Market." Don't build for "Hacker News." Don't build for the critics on Twitter who have anime avatars and zero Github contributions.

Build for one person.

Build for the version of yourself from six months ago. If you can help that person—if you can solve a problem they had, or teach them a concept they struggled with—then you have succeeded.

Even if 99% of people hate it or ignore it, if it helps that one person, it is valid.

At Orb21, we try to embrace imperfection. We ship features with known bugs (non-critical ones). We release MVPs that are ugly. We write documentation that is incomplete.

Because an imperfect thing that exists is infinitely better than a perfect thing that stays in your head.

The world doesn't need your perfection. It needs your contribution. Ship it.