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Stop Trying to Be So Smart

Your silliest work just might be your best work.

Taru Anniina Liikanen
5 min readMay 15, 2022
Photo by Hermes Rivera on Unsplash

If you’ve spent longer than a couple of weeks publishing on this platform, this has probably happened to you.

The silly 3-minute story you wrote in an hour sometimes vastly outperforms the really thoughtful 10-minute read you researched and sweated over for a week.

You might have noticed that sometimes, when you write a quick rant and let your thoughts go wherever they naturally go, people love it. This just happened to me with a story. It might be the tone, the passion behind it, or the fact that you just let yourself be without self-censoring your words.

In most things, I’m from the opposite school of thought as the biggest productivity gurus on the platform. When it comes to editing and polishing, I’m from the School of Being Realistic about Anxiety and Overthinking.

Instead of making sure everything is 100% perfect, I’d suggest overriding the publishing perfectionism by allowing yourself to be a little dumb sometimes.

Just throw it out there and see what sticks. It doesn’t matter if it’s not smart.

Sometimes the small successes start coming when you let yourself be a little silly.

The Anti-Productivity Guru

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Taru Anniina Liikanen
Taru Anniina Liikanen

Written by Taru Anniina Liikanen

Stand-up comedian and recovering political ghostwriter. Finnish by birth, porteña at heart. Bad jokes frequent.

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