I’m writing this a few days after recording my first podcast.

It’s not good.

It’s not what I want it to be.

I know the topics covered are what I wanted to cover, and I probably said a few things that I’ll be happy with. But. It’s not good. Turns out talking on a microphone isn’t as easy as having a chat with friends over coffee. Who knew?

I haven’t even listened to it yet because I’m anxious about what I’ll hear. I know I made mistakes. Lots of them.

But I’m happy with it.

I’m happy with it because it’s a baseline. No matter how good or bad it is, it’s my first attempt. I’ve never really recorded myself on a mic before, and I’ve never really done much public speaking outside of a couple of very tiny events at work.

I’m happy because the first version of anything you do should be sucky. It shouldn’t be good, because if it is, it means you’ve done nothing new, you haven’t challenged yourself.

Not always a bad thing, but I’ve found that if version one sucks and I keep going and make version two better, or in this case, be better on mic in the second episode, I’m always infinitely happier than if I were to have made something perfect in the first place.

Or, if the first version you put out is good, it means you spent too long on it. What if it’s executed well, but the idea fails? That’s a lot of time wasted.

A couple of people have said that if I’m not happy with it I should rerecord it. But that kind of defeats the purpose of the podcast.

I want to show you what sucky looks like. I want you to see that even though we might not be happy with something, putting it out there is far better than forever holding onto something, waiting for it to be perfect.

What’s more, I want to show you what it’s like to improve, to make something better over time.

Whether we’re trying something completely new, like this designer who wants to record a podcast, or something smaller, like trying to figure out who to make a bit of jQuery magic act how you want it to, the principle is the same. It’ll probably be sucky the first time you hit save.

But keep going and record the second episode, make your tweaks and hit save again, because it’s about to get a whole lot better.

It almost always does.

I use to think being creative was about making beautiful things. I’m starting to realise that being creative means getting better at making beautiful things.