> I don't publish my writing yet. But I still sit around producing pages; I wouldn't even be a dabbler if I didn't! In my opinion, the difference between me and

> I don't publish my writing yet. But I still sit around producing pages; I wouldn't even be a dabbler if I didn't! In my opinion, the difference between me and a "generalist" is that my writing sucks. But how do you know your writing sucks? You're obviously a learned guy who has a good command of language. If you published and shared your work with people, are you sure it wouldn't be received better than you think? Or maybe you'd improve in skill and ability from feedback and observation of your work out in the wild? I find any discipline where I have deadlines and have to either ship, or a competition is coming up, or a talk must be given, or something where I have to deliver/perform on some level... I find I tend to get at least modest successes in those areas. The areas I haven't released work, I'm much less skilled/accomplished. Maybe I'm getting the cause and effect backwards, but I don't think it's entirely the case. I know my writing changed (and I think, improved) a lot when I started writing publicly than when I wrote privately. It's... it's incredibly different, y'know? It sucks and it's hard and sometimes people say mean things about you, but in the end the real downside is quite low, and the upside seems quite high. And maybe your work is better than you give it credit for? Derek Sivers just wrote a really brilliant piece called "Obvious to You. Amazing to Others" [1] about how people systematically undervalue their own knowledge/skills/ability. Something like that at work, maybe? [1] http://sivers.org/obvious http://sivers.org/obvious