P**fectionism Isn’t Your Problem
taylor.town
taylor.town
Or have standards that exceed their skills. Just that often the standard is so high majority fails to comprehend and we use the word taste instead.
I think Steve Jobs is the prime example. Or May be the only example in the history of Silicon valley.
Thank you for the post.
Your standards are just the quality you can still live with without feeling bad.
Of course, keep practicing to get better. Nobody says otherwise. But don't stop practicing just because you can't get it right every time. It's the ALL or NOTHING attitude that's the problem, where getting past failure requires SOMETHING in the pursuit of the ALL.
Very well said!
One thing i see on HN/Reddit/etc. forums is that people nowadays are not willing to admit their failures/mistakes but eager to use excuses like a) I am a Perfectionist b) I was a "gifted" child c) Everything was easy for me when i was young and i did well d) I have Asperger's/Autism/ADD/ADHD/etc. Other than in rare cases none of the above excuses hold water. We are all of "comparable" Intelligence (bell curve, two std. deviations and all that) with enormous potential if we learn from our mistakes and put forth effort to do better next time. The insidiousness of the above excuses is that it saps our very motivation to do something better and change the status-quo but falsely cocoons our "ego" thus making us lose touch with Reality and destroying our own lives.
EDIT: I see in a post further down that no he didn't. Ira Glass wrote it.
Telling perfectionists to give up or go help someone else with their vision makes no sense. Many perfectionists are obsessive-compulsive by nature.
It is like telling Jobs to give up computers or for Musk to go work on Bezos rockets.
I feel like they are trying to tell the reader to lower their standards at the end, which is funny given the opening line.
Author might not be able to, but it's hasty to generalize this to everyone. I, for example, can. It's simply a matter of knowing one's self enough to know where taste originates and what principles and beliefs it's founded on.
I had to stop reading at this point as I couldn't take the rest of the piece seriously.
Technology has advanced so far, and the possibilities, and permutations of ideas is endless. Just like coming up with a theory as grond breaking as the theory of relativity is super hard, so is coming up with really novel new art....we have so many examples of it - and so much in high quality - the bar is high.
A parallel issue is societies obsession with "shipping"...specifically speaking of music/art - i remember 15+ years ago, folks working a lot longer on music before it saw the light of day - folks are very happy to show off loops on tiktok...and - the results in finished music equate to half finished/underbaked music which everyone is patting each other on the back over.
Nice post.
> “Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
There's a certain amount of anxiety and sense of defeat when you can clearly see what it is you want to create but don't yet have the skills to execute that vision. It can be very demoralizing to build a shitty app when you can recognize that it's a shitty app and you know much better is possible but don't yet know how to close the gap.
Dirty words get censored.