Leave the First One Up

There are a few blogs on this site I could fix in an afternoon.

Some of the early ones still have AI markers in them.

Phrases I would never say out loud.

A structure that's a little too tidy to be mine.

I've written about how that happened, and why I left some of them there on purpose.

It would be easy to clean them up.

A few edits, hit save, and nobody would ever know what the first version looked like.

Which is exactly the problem.

When GOAMIN wrote his first piece, I made the same choice. I left it exactly as he wrote it. I wanted a record of where he started, so that one day we could look back and see how far he'd come.

I think I'd been doing the same thing for myself without calling it that.

The first one is the measuring stick.

If you delete your first post, video, or clumsy attempt at explaining what you do, you lose the clearest record of how far you've come.

You also take something away from the people who find you later.

Somebody just starting out doesn't need to see your best work first.

They need to see that your best work didn't start out that way.

That's where a lot of people quit.

They look at someone who's been at it for years, compare it to their own first try, and decide they're not cut out for this.

They're comparing their day one to somebody else's day five hundred.

That was never a fair fight.

My early blogs are not my best work.

I'll say that before anyone else does.

But they're mine, and they show the road.

That doesn't mean you leave everything alone.

If something you made is wrong, fix it. If it hurts someone, change it. I've done that, and I'd do it again.

The rest can stay where it is.

Not because it's good.

Because it's true.

Leave the first one up.

Somebody needs to see it.