Trying In Public
Against Perfectionism
You don’t get to “A Day in the Life” without “In Spite of All the Danger“. I thought of using “I lost my little girl”, an early song McCartney wrote, which years later he said he believed was about the death of his mother Mary. It was very likely the first song he consciously wrote, but it isn’t enough to write a song if you want to be a songwriter, you must release it too. You must share it with the world. And “In Spite of All the Danger” is the first Lennon-McCartney tune released to the world, under their first group The Quarrymen. So… you don’t get “A Day in the Life” without “In Spite of All the Danger”.
Here is the point of this little phrase: If you’re too scared to share your writing, you’ll never be a writer. If you’re too scared to share your music, you’ll never be a musician. If you’re too scared to ship your products, you’ll never be an inventor. And so on. I don’t want to suggest that someone writing the world’s greatest tunes in their little bedroom is not technically a musician, they are. But if that person wants to get to their best work, I believe it involves sharing that work with others. That is what I mean. So maybe the above should read: if you’re too scared to share your writing, you’ll never write your best pieces. If you’re too scared to share your music, you’ll never write your best songs. If you’re too scared to ship your products, you’ll never invent your best products. The simple fact is that you must work your way towards your best work and the process often involves feedback from the world1. What are we scared of when we hold back our work from the world? Or more generally, why do we hold back our work from the world?
My first guess is that it is what Ira Glass describes as The Gap. The gap is the distance between your vision for your work (what you want it to be) and what you’re presently capable of producing (what it actually is). Even being aware of this gap is a good thing, many people aren’t aware of it with respect to their own work. Or rather, they sense something like The Gap exists, but don’t pinpoint their frustrations to it. But once you are aware of this gap, you may be scared to release work because of the awareness that it exists. You might think other people will see it too! But you should embrace the gap.
This gap between your standards for yourself and what you are able to produce is a good thing early on. You should have distance between your expectations and your capabilities, that just means you are ambitious and seeking to grow. Imagine if we were happy with our mediocre work, who’d want that? What we really want is there to be no gap because we are so capable (not because we have no standards), but that takes time and experimentation2. That is why you must embrace your first drafts and early work, because their deficits point you the direction you need to go to “close” the gap (to the extent that you can even do that). By recognizing and articulating our shortcomings as artists, we begin the important investigation that leads to artistic answers to those shortcomings. The answers are how we develop and recognize our own taste. We get scared that sharing work that isn’t up to our own standards will reflect poorly on us and that people will dismiss us before we get the chance to produce our best work. But that isn’t how the world works. If you make Sgt. Pepper, people will hear it. Even if your debut album was mediocre3.
Plus, upon succeeding, your failures become cool to examine. That’s why Beatles fans can’t get enough of their earliest stuff, demos, and half-written songs. I even covered John Lennon’s unreleased tune Gone From This Place.
After succeeding, your “failures” will likely feel much closer to this amazing recording from a young John, Paul and George than you think.
But, if you refuse to share your work with the world before you have a masterpiece you’ll never share a thing. This is because the process of trying, sharing, and refining is how you get to the masterpiece. Launching the prototype shows you how real people use your product and points to the future iterations needed. A bad first draft gives you something to refine, something to respond to.
So this means that you have to be comfortable trying things publicly, even when you know the chance of them succeeding are low. That is how you’ll find your life’s work and how you will do your best work once you do. The feedback from real people is what you want. The seriousness (while still being playful) will motivate you to keep with it. And as Scott McMicken pointed out once, the simple act of releasing work will reveal how you really feel about it to yourself. The moment after you send a demo or rough draft to friends or family, you will know whether you like it. You can’t help but knowing.
Some other reasons why people might hold back their work are:
Laziness: devoting time and effort to something while also juggling normal life responsibilities is truly difficult. So laziness isn’t even the right word, it’s more like submission.
Ego: refusing to release work in ways that they feel is beneath them. For example, if someone thinks they are James Joyce they may feel silly writing blog posts and refuse to release anything until they get a book deal.
Resources / Knowledge: if you want to put out a great record but can’t afford to record it decently that is a real struggle, but again it points back to accepting the limits of your current situation rather than being a perfectionist. How can you use the lo-fi limitation to experiment or make something you love? Of course this is already a beloved real world genre that people with resources emulate today.
Permission: some people feel they must be told it is ok to experiment, release less than perfect work, or take a chance at something. If you relate to this, I hereby give you permission.
Other reasons: leaving this container for other reasons I think of over time.
So try in public. When one thing you are trying doesn’t work, meticulously ask yourself why and use the answers for your next attempt. George Saunders speaks about doing this in writing and how powerful it can be for finding new areas to explore. And also routinely examine all of the things you’ve attempted previously. Like a beautiful quilt, the patchwork of past projects will help you understand the kinds of things you like doing best.
Footnotes
1.) What are the counter-examples here? I should seek out examples of people who did their best work in isolation. Though I am guessing those stories often involve “conversations” the person was having with other people’s work via reading, the internet, etc.
2.) Do we ever really want to get to this point though? Don’t you always want to be pushing yourself towards new territory where you aren’t an expert? Who wants to master one thing and do it the same way every year until you die? I guess there are some interesting aspects to that sort of life, but it isn’t what I want as an artist or person.
3.) Relatedly, if you produce a stinker later in your career, all you have to do is produce a great piece of work next time and people will come running back. I predict this is about to happen with Chance the Rapper. People just want awesome art, products, and experiences. They don’t tend to hold aesthetic grudges. Some people do at the margin, but it is a weird thing to deny yourself the pleasure of an artist’s recent work because you disliked a previous work.