8. Bad First Draft

Your first draft exists to be finished, not admired.

This book is an example. I published the first edition of The Easy Mode in early 2026. It was rushed. I had been thinking about these ideas for years but I sat down to write the book in a few weeks with a lot of help from AI, and the result was uneven. Some chapters were tight. Some were templated. A few had paragraphs in the wrong order because I never re-read them properly. I shipped it anyway, partly because shipping it was the only way to find out how I felt about it, and partly because I needed something on a page to react to.

I’m writing this edition now because the first one existed. None of the better sentences in this version would have been possible if I had waited until I felt ready. The bad first draft was the whole point. The good second draft is just a long argument with the first one.

This is how almost every honest piece of work I have made has gone. The magazine I ran in my twenties was rough at the start and got cleaner as I went. The first design book I co-wrote had pages that had to be redone. Imaginary versions of all those things could have been better than the versions I made. None of them would have survived contact with reality. The bad versions did.

Perfection is a delay tactic. It looks like quality, but it behaves like fear. The reason most people don’t finish is not that their standards are too high. It’s that they are using “I’m holding it to a high standard” as a polite phrasing of “I’m not ready to be seen.”

Easy Mode makes room for ugly versions, because ugly versions can be improved and imaginary versions can’t. You can edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank one.

If you are stuck, lower the standard until you move. Write the worst version. Save it. Walk away. Come back tomorrow and edit it. The brain does drafting and editing badly when forced to do them at the same time. Separate the modes. Draft fast and dumb. Edit slow and ruthless. Both jobs are easier alone.

The most freeing question I know in writing, design, code, and almost any other creative work: what would the ugly version look like, and could I produce it in the next thirty minutes?

Produce the ugly version. Look at it. Now you have something to argue with. Something to improve. Something to delete. Something to send to one friend and ask what is missing. The argument is the work. The work can’t start until the ugly version exists.

What is the project you have been protecting from its own first version?