I’ve been following Van Neistat’s videos since his fifth video was published, which the YouTube algorithm suggested while I was vanning through Walla Walla, Washington. I was killing time hanging out by the river and, having watched most of his brother Casey’s daily vlogs (rip daily vlogs), quickly watched all his videos beginning to end.
He can get ranty. He can be cranky. He has plenty of opinions I don’t agree with. But his videos about the creative process are fascinating.
His latest, about the struggles of perfectionism as a creative person and working toward “good enough” or “excellent,” is so relatable:
I usually operate in the “good enough” camp (ESPECIALLY blogging) with regular forays into attempting excellence (usually for work).
In the video, Van quotes Vince Lombardi: “Perfectionism is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can achieve excellence.”
I usually ship projects at “good enough” not because I don’t have attention to detail, or get bored, or can’t be bothered to polish it. It’s to ensure I actually ship them instead of over-tinkering, then leaving it alone for a while in case I want to make more edits to it later, where it inevitably stays, unpublished, until I re-discover it years later (if at all).
Instead: Finish the project. Make the next one 1% better. Repeat.
Taken this way, the definition of “good enough” is shifting, progressing, and improving. (Although, I’m a firm believer in not always forcing yourself to try improving. Embrace that growth is often non-linear.)
And maybe “good enough” and “excellent” and “perfection” are all subjective and ever-changing for each person.
I suspect my philosophy toward “good enough, just ship it and start the next” is based on where I am in my writing journey. I’m 30. I’ve had the good fortune of writing professionally for about 12 years now, on and off, part-time and full-time. But I have so much to learn, and expecting excellence from myself right now would likely result in lots of blank pages and unstarted projects because I don’t feel excellent yet.
(But on the other hand, if I don’t expect excellence of myself now, when will I begin expecting it of myself? My high school band teacher would say anything worth doing is worth doing well.)
Ira Glass of This American Life has shared how the “beginning” process for artists is a tough time, because:
“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.”
The good news is that if you don’t give up and keep working, you’ll eventually get better. “The most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.”
I received helpful advice early in my career: when you’re starting out, focus on quantity, and quality will follow.
I was volunteering at BlogCon in the Twin Cities when I was fresh out of college. I didn’t even have a blog, but I wanted to learn more about writing, photography, web design, and building your own work. And I liked learning from other creatives that were actually shipping.
One year’s keynote speaker (I have no idea who, now) shared her story of starting a vlog: she decided to post a video every single day. Her friend decided to also start a vlog but wanted to create fewer, higher-quality videos instead. At the end of the year, the daily vlogger had published a video every day, and her skills grew with each video. Yeah, she had bad videos, ones she was embarrassed to post. But she published, and she learned and grew.
Her friend never ended up clicking publish on a single video.
Austin Kleon shared a parable from David Bayles and Ted Orland’s book, Art & Fear, that really captures this anecdote:
[A] ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A.” Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
If ABC is Always Be Closing, a mantra I follow is Always Be Shipping. Sure, plenty of my writing is just for me and doesn’t make it to publication as a choice, but it’s finished. I allow myself to have creative lulls, to step out of routine and explore new interests or purposefully (painfully) embrace the suck when the inspiration is dry. But one thing I regularly tell myself is to not allow quality to get in the way of publishing.
When I was a kid, my dad’s friend Elmo was a carpenter that framed a lot of houses around small towns in southwestern Minnesota. He’d sarcastically joke when finishing up a framing job: “Well, perfect is good enough.” That little joke is something I say to myself pretty often when I’m clicking “publish,” knowing it’s nowhere near perfect, but it’s getting me a little closer to excellent each day.