When I look at a book, generally I try to visualize the text as the product of the author(s) whole lives, full of their own mistakes, water cooler conversation, dinner table discussion with friends, scribbled notes, tenth drafts, old homework assignments, college essays, and shower thoughts—subjected to an extensive editing process to strip away anything contrary to the image that the author wants to give off.
But I still tend to feel much more motivated to babble when I’m striving for an end result that I think will be original, useful, and tractable. I have a deep distrust in “exercises” unless they’re widely endorsed by experts in the field and excellence in that field is easy to determine for an outsider.
One of the issues with perfectionism is that there are many cases where early work is inadequate or even harmful, even though further polish has the potential to create something of great utility. It’s the Straw Vulcan problem as applied to the things we make for ourselves.
That doesn’t mean you have to start perfect. In fact, you can’t. Nor should you give up in advance. You have to go through an iterative process to get there. Good babble means trusting in that messy process to get you, in the end, to a perfect product.
When I look at a book, generally I try to visualize the text as the product of the author(s) whole lives, full of their own mistakes, water cooler conversation, dinner table discussion with friends, scribbled notes, tenth drafts, old homework assignments, college essays, and shower thoughts—subjected to an extensive editing process to strip away anything contrary to the image that the author wants to give off.
But I still tend to feel much more motivated to babble when I’m striving for an end result that I think will be original, useful, and tractable. I have a deep distrust in “exercises” unless they’re widely endorsed by experts in the field and excellence in that field is easy to determine for an outsider.
One of the issues with perfectionism is that there are many cases where early work is inadequate or even harmful, even though further polish has the potential to create something of great utility. It’s the Straw Vulcan problem as applied to the things we make for ourselves.
That doesn’t mean you have to start perfect. In fact, you can’t. Nor should you give up in advance. You have to go through an iterative process to get there. Good babble means trusting in that messy process to get you, in the end, to a perfect product.