Most of the bad work I’ve done has come from tying it with my ego in one of the following ways:

• I made this, and if it’s not great I’m not great. 

• If I don’t release something, what will people think of me? Worse, what will I think of me? 

• I need to defend what I made because it’s a symbol of who I am. 

• If you don’t accept my work, you don’t accept me. 

Internal work exists before and during the project, and external work is the final result. The order is key to creating something worthwhile.

An example: I wrote a blog faithfully every other day for 5 years. Three years in I was posting mostly because I worried that my readers would stop reading if I didn’t post. The blog post quality suffered, and I burnt myself out. 

I made two mistakes: I wasn’t focused enough on the internal work (developing a good headspace that would create interesting topics, then writing blogs that were as compelling as I could make them) and instead focused on the perception of my externalized work. I attached ego to work that hadn’t even been done yet.  

Taking the audience away from the way we think about what we do is liberating. It forces us to decide if what we’re doing is really worthwhile, and what is just commercially successful.