The ‘not ready to share’ antipattern
My friend and mentor Danny Lieberman writes an excellent newsletter about antipatterns: the moves people make instinctively that quietly cost them (https://substack.com/@dannylieberman). This post is in that spirit. The antipattern: keeping important work to yourself until it is ready. The fix turns out to be the thing the old saying tells you not to do.
When is your work actually ready to share?
The instinct is universal. When people work on something they consider important and big, they retreat into a shell and wait for the work to be done before they show it to anyone. A report for leadership. A presentation. A new product. A Python module. A pitch deck. The instinct is the same: I will share when it is ready.
There is a saying in many languages: do not show half-done work to a donkey. It sounds like discipline. I think it is one of the more harmful rules people carry around. It tells you to optimize for not looking foolish today, while saying nothing about whether your final product will be any good.
A donkey, the audience the saying tells you to fear.
“Show me your work”
This is the trap the donkey saying sets. It tells you the audience is the problem. Show your work only to people who can already see what you see. Otherwise they will misread, miss the point, ask a question whose answer is on page two. They will. That is the feature, not the bug. The “donkey” from the saying, the reader you were told to hide rough work from, is the most useful reader you have. They cannot see the picture you carry in your head, which means they will show you where it fails outside it.
What sharing rough work actually gets you
If the legal or IP situation allows, share your work long before you think it is ready. The half-done draft. The rough plot. The function that almost compiles. The demo with three broken screens.
Most of the feedback will be off-target. You will think, this person did not get it. Sometimes they did not. More often, they got something you stopped noticing: that the framing was not clear, that the order of the argument was confusing, that the assumption you treated as obvious is not obvious to anyone else. You think you know what you know, but you might not know what you know.
The embarrassment cost of sharing rough work is small and one-time. The cost of polishing the wrong thing is large and compounds.
So pick the piece of work you have been keeping in your shell because it is “not ready to share yet.” Find one person who will give you an honest reaction. Send it to them today, in the state it is in, with one sentence:
“I am still working on this and I do not know what it will be. Tell me what you see.”
You will get back something useful, often only one sentence. That sentence is worth more than another week alone with the draft.
If you are in academia and work on a paper, publish a draft on arxiv or preprints.org. You will timestamp your findings so nobody scoops you, and you will attract feedback that makes the review process smoother. Loud Camel, the tool I work on, helps you attract that feedback faster.