If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing Badly

Improvement takes a lot of wrong turns

There’s no such thing as perfection. Though we like to think ‘practice makes perfect,’ it doesn’t.

Practice makes excellence.

Aiming for perfection is a ‘wild goose chase.’ You’ll never attain perfection. You’ll never get to a point where there’s nothing new to learn. And that’s okay because there’s always room for growth.

Since perfection is beyond reach, the goal, therefore, is to gain excellence through mastery. To be the best version of what you have set out to be. To be competent and effective at what you do.

Where many creators miss it is they focus on the finished product. They allow themselves to be misled by the success of others, failing to see that no one tweets their behind-the-scene. So naively we judge our behind-the-scenes with others' highlight reels.

After writing for over a year, I came to understand that there’s no overnight success. So I learned to focus on progress rather than success because success isn’t a destination — success is the continuous accumulation of progress.

As a newbie creator, give yourself room to make mistakes, to falter, and to learn.

There’s no other way.

It may seem like all you’re creating is bullshit right now, but that’s because you’re comparing your work to those already ahead of you. The challenging twists and turns you’re going through now, every successful person goes through them.

Mastery is gained only by hours and hours of work – consistent pounding at your craft.

I’m reminded of when our house was been built, during the digging of the borehole, I remembered how only mud and dirty water came out first.

But the laborers kept going. After hours of drilling, draining, and changing of long iron pipes, clean water sprang out.

Imagine if the laborers had given up when only dirt water came out. They’d never had gotten to the place where they found clean water.

So also is life and any craft we wish to engage with. There’s always going to be dirt in the early phase. If we wish to gain mastery, we must learn to put up with the dirt.

We must try to put up with the shitty results first.

Think about something you’re good at right now. Then think back to when you just started out. How awful were you? Take your smartphone as an example, everyone was a novice at one point. We tinkered until we found where ringtones could be changed. Something as little as a ringtone change.

I bet today you can type a text message without looking whilst talking to someone. That’s the power of sticking to a task. It’s a good example of what you stand to gain by enduring the learning and shitty processes.

I know they say, what’s worth doing, is worth doing well. But that, in my opinion, is if you know how to do it. And if you don’t know how to do it?

Then it’s worth doing badly until you get it right.