The Fastest Way to Grow is to Share Your Work

The most critical skill in building success is showing up and doing the work. To make sure the work you're doing is as effective as possible, make sure you're learning from your output.

Show up, do the work, and don't forget to keep learning

A benefit of consistency is that you get lots of reps and lots of feedback.

Deliberate practice — e.g. putting in lots of reps on the thing you want to improve at — is a proven way to build world-class skills.

Getting real feedback from the audience you're trying to reach is also proven to improve the quality of your work.

By focusing on consistently putting things out there, you have more opportunities to try something, learn from its reception, adjust your approach, and try again.

But remember to both learn and adjust — without the effort to gather feedback and act on it, you'll benefit from consistency, but won't see the full potential of your growth.

Steady, incremental progress adds up in a big way

It's easy to hold back from putting something out because it doesn't feel big enough to matter.

We delay shipping to add more or rework concepts. We wait for inspiration to strike. And as the gap between releases gets bigger and bigger, we feel more and more pressure to make the next thing we put out big enough to justify the longer wait — a losing game.

Instead of focusing our energy on huge, standalone efforts, we can see a lot more cumulative progress by focusing on what James Clear calls the power of tiny gains.

Stacking up steady, incremental progress has a compounding effect. 1% every day may not sound like much, but the cumulative effect is exponential growth over longer periods of time.

(And, to be clear, "longer periods" isn't actually all that long. A year happens fast.)

Consistent practice as close as you can get to a guarantee of success

There's no way to be 100% certain things will work out, but if you show up, do the work, share it, gather feedback, and learn from it, you will improve and you will see results.

When I started Learn With Jason, I never could have predicted that it would become a full-time job, or that it would reach as many developers as it has. The show itself isn't all that novel or unique — what's set it apart is that I kept releasing shows. I now have over 4 years of consistent practice, and I've put the lessons from each show into practice with each subsequent episode. If I'd given up on it back in 2018 when it felt like I wasn't making much progress, my current lifestyle wouldn't be possible.

The results might seem small at first, but if you're patient and give yourself time to build momentum, the compounding returns over time will be huge.