Sins of commission

You heard it here first: I've fallen in to a classic creative trap called "how can I ever be as good as [insert existing thing here]?

A few weeks ago I ripped off a quick post about Travis Pastrana and the future of the world economy.  It took me 15 minutes, I'm not sure where it came from, and it was easy, easy, easy to write.  Largely because I wasn't worried about who would read it, words just poured out of my fingers.  I just wanted to catch the thought and get it down on paper.  The thing is, people liked it.  People really liked it, and since then I've been spending a lot of time -- too much time -- thinking about what I could write that would be as good as that one, and in the process of doing so I've stopped writing.

What a mistake.  I've fallen in to a classic creativity trap.  And I should know better.

The reality about bringing cool stuff to life is that you actually have to bring a lot of crappy stuff to life along the way, and sometimes good stuff happens.  And sometimes great stuff happens.  But spending your time doing nothing in the name of perfection is a sure recipe for failure.  In other words, for something great to happen, things first need to happen.  If anything, 2009 is a year for all of us to laugh in the face of perfection and embrace sins of commission.  The good stuff will come.

It's hard, though.  Be strong.

Comments

[Michael Turro]

Ahh... sounds to me like you subscribe to the Cult of Done Manifesto - http://www.ikiw.org/2009/03/04/the-cult-of-done-manifesto/ - Bravo!

[hidezumi]

Japanese culture encourages thinking before taking action and always assume there is a right answer to solve a problem. But as long as creativity is concerned, try-and-error phase is necessary, it seems. Why? Because there is no right answers for your problem yet. There is no efficient steps to get a new idea as you say.

One of good features of blogging is NOT to impress people with great ideas but to show your process to come up with essence. Of cause it is a good strategy to show essence only but you need to work out somewhere else to get an idea.

In addition to this, I believe I need to learn from my previous posts, look back and reconsider so that to come up with better something and hope to contribute to somebody. Also learning from track-back and comments are helpful. Social bookmark services have unique feature. Sometimes their comments convey messages to writers.

This entry is very encouraging and therefore I would like to introduce to Japanese readers here.