Making (good) things
Perfect things? Excellent things? Memorable things?
I like to make things. I like to actually make good things.
Which means that when I am trying to create things there is an inner critic/editor that is constantly trying to evaluate the quality of my creations. Is the opening to this article good? Is the title good? Is this theme good? Is good even the right word to focus on?
It can really spiral. So lately I’ve been trying to think about about what even makes something good? Is it being flawless? The default for my critic is to try and eliminate all flaws from what I am making. If I am writing, then the grammar, the spelling, the showing vs. telling, the word choice, the structure, the concept, the tone, the voice. I am constantly trying to evaluate if there are any mistakes I have made, anything that is “wrong”. But often times, the most memorable things aren’t memorable because they are flawless. The temptation to smooth out all the rough edges is strong, but the rough edges are often what leave a mark, what makes one remember something.
The other way of something leaving a mark, is being unique. But who even is original at all. All ideas have been done before, everything is recycled, remixed, rehashed.
But what if I made something unique that is also flawless? How would I even judge that. That’s the central tension I have been thinking about. How do I explore excellence in absence of perfection. Can I even? Should I even bother to try? Perfection often comes from having standards of “this is how things are done” and uniqueness by definition is something fresh, unprecedented, never done before. So how do I polish something that is completely new.
I must spoil the ending of this article and tell you that I don’t have an answer to that question. I don’t know how to define excellence without implicitly thinking about making things flawless. I know conceptually that excellence is refinement of strengths and perfection is an absence of errors but the two have lived in such an overlapping fashion in my mind for so long that I can’t tell you where one begins and the other ends.
I’ve been struggling with that recently. I feel like my art doesn’t have that thing that is excellent.
Whatever I create feels a little bit like it is lacking something. A lack would mean a flaw, and if I am trying to remove that lack, maybe I am trying to make it flawless? But how could my art, which is uniquely mine, without any standards from the outside world, even be flawless? Isn’t everything I create mine, so it is self defining the standards? I know this is what makes making things fun, because there is this feeling of an endless dive in my mind towards what makes my work and my voice different, the act of creation is equal parts an act of invention and of discovery.
But is that thing that I am discovering?
I’ve written about perfectionistic behavior before. I have thought about perfectionism for the entirety of my creative career, and while I am not as overtly perfection oriented as a lot of other folks, I still have those tendencies. The second, third, fourth guessing. The “something is off” feeling. The not good enough feeling. I know that it’s not that excellent things never have flaws. But it is that you don’t even remember to think about their flaws when the excellence shines bright.
I used to try and get GPT to give me editorial notes on these articles. Notes in layers and layers. And over time I realized that it didn’t help. It didn’t make my articles better, even though there were things I was improving. It just felt like I had no criterion for what made the piece itself, but I was going and polishing things that didn't matter. Even after stopping that, I am not sure if my writing has gotten better though. Even if I wrote or made something excellent, would I even recognize it? Or would I still keep feeling like it needs to change? It all just feels like a dead end.
This was a lot of rambling but I would be mighty grateful if you have ideas on how you think about perfection, excellence. Do you think about them? Does it keep you from creating? From showing your work?
Are you grounding into purpose? I use purpose for almost everything, from planning to deciding what to cut or keep. (Purpose being very different than goal and being more like a set of values.)
Beyond resonance with your purpose, testing and iteration can tell you if your creation is landing the way you want it to.
One definition of excellence might be resonance in your own heart with your purpose. Another might be that other people feel the same purpose from the piece. Or it could be a combination of both of these. Or myriads of others.
I'd start by playing with what your definition of excellence is by trying different ones and seeing how they feel.
In my view excellence is definitely not about technique, especially when most technique has been established by people whose values I don't resonate with.