One and a half months into my daily blogging, one particular benefit has emerged as most influential for me.

Daily blogging helps me beat my (scare-quotes)"perfectionism."

I won't sugarcoat it. I have too often fallen victim to what procrastinators like myself endearingly call "perfectionism." After so long proudly wearing this pyrite badge, I realized the very notion if being a "perfectionist" is self-serving and misleading. Through lots of difficult emotional labor, I've discovered that for me at least it masked a combination of harder-to-swallow facets of my psyche, including, but not limited to:

• an overly harsh, critical view of self

• negative habitual self-talk

• deep-seated shades of self-loathing

• a dastardly propensity to procrastinate, plain and simple

Now, I can't move on without acknowledging the positive side of the "perfectionism." Yes, without a doubt, this affliction resulted legitimately from possessing a strong grasp of what true excellence looks like in various fields - including writing, basketball, debating, emotional health, and more. What it looks like, feels like, sounds like.

You could boil it down to "having good taste." Ira Glass' The Gap explains just this phenomenon better than anything else I've seen so far.

Okay Jake, but why start daily blogging?

I'd been reading about it left and right. Nuggets of wisdom rained from people who've been there - forgive me for my inability to attribute them properly at this moment, but these wisdom droplets kept adding up - things like:

• You don't really start working on your project until you've launched.

• You'll never be ready. You've got to ship before you think you're ready.

• Move fast and break things. (Wait, that didn't turn out so well after all. That will certainly be the subject of more scrutiny on here - stay tuned...)

Forcing myself to publish a daily blog would get me in the practice of consistently building something quickly that I was comfortable signing my name on and releasing. Would it be any good? Not a care. I'll say this: if even one tiny portion of any of these daily blogs serves some person in some way, I'll be happy. It's farther along than I was before. I'll be providing more value than I was before I shared these thoughts.

But by exercising the muscle of clicking "publish" and sending something out to the whole world, I'd have to learn to create quality quickly, or at least become comfortable letting it fly in front of others.

In short, publishing daily would get me out of hiding. From the world, and from myself.