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Comment by tw1010 | Hacker News Reader

I tend to become much better at things a lot quicker if I just ingest a lot of the stuff (books, code, etc) and then spit out a mountain of it, instead of obsessing over making each and every thing I produce perfect.

Perfect isn't even an unchanging state. The better you are, the higher your standards become.

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I recall reading a study previously (I can't find it at the moment) on creativity. The two groups were given two tasks in an art class. First group was told they would be graded on the sheer volume of output, while the other was told they would be graded on the most creative thing they could produce (I'm leaving out a ton of detail, and I can't remember what kind of art class it was).

The conclusion of the study was that the first group, who was just focused on volume of output, actually produced more creative works than the group specifically focused on "creativity".

You got it right but here's a link[1] with that original story and also some commentary on how this all relates to software development.

[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-quality...

Perfectionism is fine if you can concretely define measurable goals before you start working, and trust yourself to have a process of refinement that doesn't feel like a circular loop to you. This can be very validating for some people in a sense that it's autonomous - independent from validation via the economy and independent from validation via culture, both being dynamical systems and consequently difficult to predict shifts in preference.

Establishing dependency primarily on anything besides your own standard is a shortcut to misery when someone just doesn't care enough about every little detail you lovingly put into something.

You may annoy the fuck out of everyone around you if you are actually successful, and it's important to be in a social environment where people are tolerant of perfectionism and thrive from it.

It's just called being devoted. It doesn't have to be trivialized to a pejorative and mapped to a set of things approximately related to whatever goal you define. People can pick up on all of these things and get it wrong because unless you explain to them the point of all your work they won't necessarily understand it. It's then easy to internalize their issues as your own, which can implicitly shift your own standards, preferences.

'Better' in comparison to others is a state of mind that is ultimately destructive. If you like details and like feeling a sense of progress you define, better is perfectly fine to want to be. Muted, dull sameness has it's own tormented unchanging cyclical state that can be just as challenging to direct oneself out of once you convince yourself into it.

I guess our brain is tuned for experience. Even for trivial things, like tiny electromechanic setups, I can think hard and feel stuck, and often by just doing any thing, suddenly my mind sees a lot of new ideas. Probably a space search reduction.

I aspire to write a novel at some point despite the fact I haven't done much writing. When I did try to write prose I found it was much more different that writing emails for work. With email I obsess about being clear and concise, editing the same few lines over and over again. Everything I read about writing, like Stephen King's On Writing, suggest you need flow and to create a rough draft in order to get anything good. So, in order to get perfection you have to (temporarily) embrace imperfection.

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