Everything you do sucks. So why worry so much about it?
Before I started publishing, before I worked on making my own products, I was worried about one thing: quality. To be fair, it’s a valid thing to worry about; releasing something that’s absolute dog shit is going to do nothing but the laugh of the town.
However, as I went on, I began to notice something: no matter how many times I built, worked on design, edited an re-edited… it never stopped looking like dog shit to me. There was always something to be improved.
This is the endless hamster wheel of perfectionism. It’s what keeps all your ideas locked up inside, never to see the light of day.
So I decided on something else. I decided to take my idea of incremental improvement to heart. In this case, it meant to move fast and break things.
Do you think the MVP of Facebook looked good? Do you think Neil Gaiman’s first story was a masterpiece? If you keep expecting the first thing you make to be your masterwork, you’re going to be crushed with disappointment — especially since chances are barely anyone will see it anyway.
True; there is a chance someone will see it, and there is a chance they’ll criticize you about it. But what do you care? You take whatever semblance of good critique they happen to have, and use it to build the next, better thing.
If you expect that everything you do sucks, you no longer have to worry about making something that’s good. You just need to worry about making something better. The goal isn’t to not suck. The goal is to suck less.
