Power of Editing Your Work
The following chapter is from Comeback Kid: 101 Short Stories, Essays, and Insights to Improve Communication Skills
There may come a day when I stop editing my own work.
All I do is create the ideas.
And outsource the proofreading, punctuation and spelling process.
Or maybe I keep it in house.
Who knows…
‘Why would you keep that in house? Editing is the most boring part!’
You’re right about that.
Well, that’s what I used to think.
Editing was boring & a chore.
It’s even more annoying when you think you caught all the mistakes, but that wasn’t the case.
You ever watch those Masterclass commercials on YouTube?
They really know how to make a commercial.
Makes you want to check out what those classes are all about.
Recently, there was an Asian man who popped up on the ad.
He was a prodigy with playing the cello.
I watch the video all the way through.
Somewhere in the ad, he said something along the lines of:
‘I had the audacity to think I could play the perfect note.’
He said he was once in a concert & everything was going perfectly well…
But he was bored out of his mind.
That night, he said he changed his paradigm.
He would dedicate the rest of his life to ‘human expression’ rather than ‘human perfection.’
When I heard that, I resonated with it.
It’s because there have been plenty of times when I was trying to perfectly edit a piece.
Whether it was a blog, email or tweet.
Only to notice that there was something that could have been done better.
I don’t only mean in terms of spelling.
That happens.
That’s something I’m okay with.
But I mean in terms of conveying the sentence.
When I read back my old writing, I see what could have been there rather than only trying to fix what was already there.
I realized the more that I edit my own writing, the more I began to think more efficiently as well.
It’s because I built an internal compass to spot necessary vs unnecessary.
I think great writers are born in the editing process.
When they are getting a feel for what they like vs what they don’t like.
A while back, editing was something I HAD to get rid of.
Nowadays, I do it with more joy.
Knowing that each rep that I put in, the more I am chasing human expression, rather than human perfection.
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