Doing it in public can be emotionally challenging, technically complex, and constantly confronting. Why should you do it? What is all this for?
To silence the voice of “not good enough”
Every maker or creator (yes, that’s you too) has had at least a moment where they’ve doubted whether their work is good enough. For some people, it’s a fleeting worry that is quickly dismissed. If you’re like most people (including me), this doubt can be more pervasive, lying dormant in the recesses of your creative mind, ready to pounce on every potentially good idea with ruinous intent. This gremlin tells you to stop, to hold on, to wait until something is just right, until it’s perfect, because otherwise people will be disappointed or find out what a fraud you are. Sometimes, this gremlin may even win.
Here’s a way to defeat that gremlin for good: do it in public.
The reframe from “creating” to “learning in public” can have dramatic implications.
When you think of “creating” something, it can feel like there is an assumption of completion: if something isn’t done, can you really say it’s been created? But perversely, it’s the same doneness that can keep you from persevering or finishing. Creation can feel like a monumental summit after a mountain of smaller tasks.
In contrast, learning in public doesn’t require for things to be done. The very nature of doing it in public implies incompletion and the openness to further progress. Publicly announcing you’re doing it in public means saying to the gremlin (and to the world):
No, I’m not good enough. But I’m getting there. Want to watch?
This playful twist on insecurity and imposter syndrome, coupled with the invitation to participate, is what makes doing it in public fun and effective.
To be ethically creative
Creativity doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Everything you make was built on a scaffold of other people’s ideas, other people’s words, other people’s work. The book you read last year, the podcast you listened to while doing the dishes, the offhand comment someone made in a Discord server at 2am that you can’t stop thinking about — all of it feeds into what you eventually make. We are, all of us, remixers and synthesizers, standing on the shoulders of giants who are themselves standing on the shoulders of other giants.
This is fine. This is, in fact, the entire point. But it comes with a responsibility.
When you learn in public, you make your sources visible. You say: here’s what I read, here’s who influenced me, here’s the idea I’m borrowing and building on. This isn’t just good citation practice — it’s an ethical stance. It says that you understand you didn’t arrive at your ideas alone, and that you want to send credit back where it came from. It’s the difference between a magpie and a thief: both collect shiny things, but only one is honest about it.
There’s also something powerful that happens when you make your sources visible: other people can follow the trail. They can go read what you read, find the original thinker, discover a whole new rabbit hole they wouldn’t have found otherwise. Your public learning becomes a map that others can use. That, to me, is the highest form of creative ethics — not just giving credit, but giving access.
To open-source your knowledge
Software developers figured out something that the rest of us are still catching up to: when you share your code openly, everyone benefits — including you.
Open-source software is built on the radical idea that making your work freely available to others doesn’t diminish it; it improves it. When thousands of people can read your code, some of them will find bugs you missed. Some will suggest improvements you never would have thought of. Some will fork your work and take it in directions that are more useful than anything you originally intended. The code gets better. The ecosystem grows. Everyone wins.
Knowledge works the same way. When you keep what you know locked inside your head, or inside a private notebook that nobody else will ever read, you become a single point of failure. If you stop working on something, everything you learned about it disappears. But when you publish your notes, your thinking, your half-formed ideas — even the stuff you’re not sure about yet — you turn your private knowledge into a public resource. Someone else building the same thing you built can benefit from your experience. Someone else making the same mistake you made can find your post-mortem and avoid it. Your learning exhaust becomes someone else’s head start.
I’ve had strangers find blog posts I wrote years ago about tools I barely use anymore and tell me those posts were exactly what they needed. I didn’t think those posts were particularly good. They were just documentation of a thing I was trying to figure out. But that’s exactly why they were useful — not despite their messiness, but because of it.
To hold yourself accountable
There’s a reason why fitness challenges work better with a friend. There’s a reason why language learning communities like the one that got me speaking Dutch have higher completion rates than apps you use alone. There’s a reason why people in Alcoholics Anonymous tell their stories to a room full of strangers. It’s not just the social support (though that matters). It’s the accountability that comes from having witnesses.
When you learn in public, the internet becomes your accountability partner. Once you’ve told people you’re going to do something, the social cost of not doing it goes up. This might sound like a bad thing — like public pressure is something to avoid — but for those of us who are really good at making promises to ourselves and then quietly letting them slide, it’s exactly the right kind of friction.
I started writing this book in public, including the outline and early chapters on a website anyone can read. I told people about it in videos. I have given talks about doing it in public while this book was still barely half-written. At every point, I was making it harder to give up. Not because I was forced to, but because the public commitment created a structure that my private self-promises never could. The gremlin that whispers “nobody has to know if you stop” loses its power when people do know, and when you’ve already shown them what you’re working on.
To show your work
Austin Kleon wrote a book called Show Your Work! that I think about constantly. The central premise is simple: being talented isn’t enough anymore. You also have to be findable. And being findable means leaving a trail — of questions you’ve asked, experiments you’ve run, things you’ve learned, work you’ve made, mistakes you’ve corrected.
We tend to think of the work as the thing we’re making and the rest of it as overhead: the research, the drafts, the failed attempts, the confusion. But for a public learner, all of that is the work. It’s not waste — it’s signal. When you document the process and not just the product, you create something that has value beyond the final artifact. You create a record of how ideas actually develop, which is messy and nonlinear and full of backtracking and surprise.
This matters practically, too. People who can see your work in progress can help you before you’ve gone too far down the wrong path. They can say “that assumption you made two weeks ago is wrong” before you’ve built an entire skyscraper on a cracked foundation. They can suggest the book you haven’t read yet that would completely change your approach. Showing your work isn’t just a philosophical stance — it’s a strategy for getting better outcomes by shortening the feedback loop.
And honestly? It’s also just more interesting. The finished thing is neat. The mess that made it is a story.
To git gud
In gaming, “git gud” is the slightly sarcastic advice given to players who are struggling: just get good. It’s often said dismissively, as if getting good at something is simply a matter of deciding to be better at it. But underneath the meme, there’s something real.
Getting good at something requires practice, and practice requires repetition, and repetition requires doing the thing over and over again even when you’re bad at it. The only way to stop being bad at something is to go through the phase of being bad at it. There are no shortcuts. But there are ways to compress the timeline — and doing it in public is one of them.
When your practice happens in public, you get feedback in real time. You learn faster which approaches work and which ones don’t. You get corrections from people who know more than you. You build a track record that documents your improvement — which is motivating when you can actually see it, week over week, month over month. Learning in public turns practice into performance, in the best possible way: it makes the stakes just high enough that you take it seriously, while keeping it low enough that you can afford to fail.
I am proof that this works. I learned to speak Dutch publicly, in front of a camera, making mistakes in front of an audience that was kind enough to correct me. I learned load testing tools publicly, livestreaming while I struggled through the documentation. I learned Kubernetes publicly, asking basic questions in community channels where the experts could see. Every skill I’m remotely good at now, I learned in public. Not because I had to, but because it was the fastest way to go from lost to competent to, eventually, occasionally useful.
Git gud. Do it in public.