On Doing Things Badly

A pottery teacher in Florida once ran an experiment that has been quietly demolishing the alibis of perfectionists ever since. He split his class in two. One half would be graded on quantity: fifty pounds of pots earned an A, forty a B, weighed on a bathroom scale on the last day. The other half would be graded on a single pot — but it had to be perfect. One flawless bowl for the whole term.

You can guess the ending, because you have lived some version of it. The best pots — the truest curves, the cleanest glaze — all came from the quantity group. While they churned out lopsided pot after lopsided pot, learning from each small catastrophe, the quality group sat around theorizing about perfection and produced, in the end, a heap of grand ideas and a lump of dead clay.¹

I think about that class more than is probably healthy. Mostly because I recognize myself in the wrong half.

The nicer outfit

We have agreed, as a culture, that perfectionism is the flaw you confess in a job interview. My greatest weakness? I just care too much about getting things right. It is the humblebrag of character defects, the one that arrives dressed for dinner.

But look at what it actually does. It does not make you do better work. It makes you do no work, and then feel virtuous about the standards that prevented it. The novel you have not started cannot disappoint you. The business you keep "researching" cannot fail. The conversation you keep rehearsing cannot go wrong. Perfectionism is not a commitment to excellence; it is a sophisticated machine for postponing the moment of contact with reality, where everything is, at first, a bit of a mess.

The tell is that perfectionists are rarely paralyzed by the standards of other people. They are paralyzed by an imaginary version of themselves who would have done it flawlessly — a person who does not exist, has never made anything, and exists chiefly to make the real, fumbling you feel inadequate. You are losing a race to a ghost.

The perfectionist guards the dream by never testing it; the maker tests it constantly, is wrong constantly, and is somehow the one who eventually gets it right.

The first ugly draft

Here is the thing nobody tells you about good writers, good cooks, good anyone: the gap between them and you is not that their first attempt is better than yours. It is that they have made peace with the first attempt being bad, and so they actually make it.

Every finished thing you admire began as something embarrassing. The elegant essay started as a paragraph the author would now pay money to delete. The confident talk was once a panicky list of bullet points that refused to connect. Quality is not the opposite of quantity; it is what quantity turns into if you keep showing up. You cannot edit a blank page. You can only edit a bad one — and a bad page is a tremendous achievement next to nothing, because nothing cannot be improved and a bad page can become almost anything.

The trick I keep relearning is to lower the stakes of the single instance to near zero. Not write the essay but write a bad version of the first bit. Not have the difficult conversation perfectly but say the true thing clumsily and repair as you go. The badness is not a cost to be minimized. It is the toll you pay to get onto the road at all.

A few things I have noticed, once you give yourself permission to be terrible:

• The terror lives almost entirely in the anticipation. The doing is fine, even pleasant. Dread is a tax on the future that the present never actually collects.
• You learn more from one finished bad thing than from ten perfect plans, because the bad thing talks back. The plan only ever agrees with you.
• Speed is its own kind of honesty. Work made quickly has fewer places to hide the fact that you didn't really know what you were doing — which is exactly the feedback you need.

There is a deeper reason the quantity group wins, and it has nothing to do with pots or essays. They relocated the question. They stopped asking is this good? — which strangles you, because you cannot answer it about a thing that does not yet exist — and started asking what is the next one? The first question is a verdict. The second is a direction. One ends the conversation; the other keeps it going.

I have come to think that the willingness to do something badly is not a lowering of standards at all. It is the highest standard there is, because it is the only one that produces anything.

So make the ugly thing. Then make the second ugly thing. The mastery you are waiting to feel before you begin is not the price of admission — it is the souvenir they hand you on the way out, and the only way to reach the exit is to walk, badly, through the whole museum first.