Overcoming your biggest creative challenge

"Allow yourself to create badly." [View in browser]( How to conquer fear and doubt. Hi again, I hope everything is going well. If you’ve been busy creating stuff recently, you may have been frustrated by something I call “the creator’s curse.” It goes like this: you are always striving to get better, and learning new skills, which means you are raising your own bar of what you deem high quality work. This inevitably leads you to be dissatisfied and frustrated with what you’re able to produce. But here’s the other truth: to get good at anything, you must do it very badly for a long time. This is totally natural. Everybody starts as a beginner. You must accept and recognize that to produce amazing work, you first have to make a lot of crap. There’s no getting around it. There’s no shortcut. Creating quality is a skill that’s developed through actionable practice, not just reading and learning. You can speed things up by copying and imitating writers and artists that you admire. And you really need to learn the basics – the rules to your particular art or craft – before you can internalize them and create something new and meaningful. Learn the rules. Absorb the work of the masters as closely as you can. Identify patterns and habits they use. Find yourself a mentor - somebody who is in the place you hope to get to - and ask if you can shadow them (or simply find out all you can about how they've achieved their success). Read lots of books about your craft, or watch YouTube videos, or listen to podcasts. And while you’re doing that, allow yourself to produce badly. Set yourself a big, big goal. When I started writing fiction, my goal was to write 10 terrible novellas. Planning to write terribly freed me from paralyzing self-doubt, fear of rejection or failure, or overanalyzing. My goal was not to write one book and revise it for a year – it was to write one book, publish and start the next. My aim wasn't to make money with these ten books, but to build my platform. Actually, they didn't turn out that bad, and have helped me grow a list of 35K readers and earn a little over $50K from Kindle. Quantity leads to quality.  Most writers get stuck because they start with their passion project, and they care too much about it to let go. They want it to be perfect, so they obsess over that one first book. It's much easier to start with a book project you don't care so much about, and use it for practice. You don’t have to publish it or make it available, but I recommend doing so: it will also help you learn the publishing process, or about creating and selling art, and you’ll be getting real, valuable feedback. You don't need to actually promote it or share it much if you don’t think it’s very good, but putting low quality work out in the world where people can see it makes you desperate to make up for it by producing higher quality work as soon as you can. Done is better than perfect. A lot of art and writing sells like crazy and earns amazing money, even if the quality is poor. It's more about resonating with a target audience. So don't overthink it. Publish quickly, fail fast, pivot based on the market's reaction to your work. Some will find that idea scandalous, but if you want to earn a living from this, you need to be willing to please a market. Content matters more than perfection. I've seen tons of creative people get stuck in the Quality Trap - unwilling to let go of the idea that working harder is the same as creating great work. They invariably say things like "people don't appreciate quality anymore" or "popular stuff is cheap garbage." Unintentionally, they are creating work for a very small market while disparaging the larger ones. That might be fine if you create luxury products, but if you need to make a living from $3.99 books you need work that will be loved by a larger audience. With books and art (or even business), content matters more than form. If readers love the story, they won't really care about the writing, or a handful of typos; while an extremely polished and "well-written" book may not satisfy readers - and can even be annoying. Don't assume your book is better because less people enjoy it! Last year Amazon republished one of my articles on editing, and it's a great example of this topic.  They shared the article on[ their Facebook page]( (with 229,890 followers) with the controversial heading, "No editor, no problem." Of course, that riled up all the professional editors, who were quick to point out that the article had some grammar errors in it. But it also got 275 shares - even more than [Hugh Howey's article]( about how, by demanding perfection, readers have gotten lazy. On a meta level, it enforces my main point, that content matters most, and you can be successful even if you make mistakes as long as you're providing value - and that having something done is better than polishing something nobody wants. It also shortens the feedback loop, which means you learn faster once you put your work out there and see how people actually respond to it. Don't forget Salvador Dali's famous quote — "Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it." Perfectionism isn't the goal, it's part of the problem.  Fail daily and improve quickly. The other benefit of setting your intention towards failure rather than perfection, is that it immediately frees you up from the crippling frustration many creative people face after their dreams of getting rich and famous don't pan out. I see this all the time - authors publish a couple books and then give up, because it's all so much harder than they thought and they don't think they can cut it. It takes years of hard work to get good at something while also figuring out the business side of things. Most people make what THEY want and then hide and sulk when they realize nobody else appreciates their greatness; they become jaded and cynical because their philosophy of life ("If you build it, they will come") turned out to be a lie. If you focus on serving an audience by providing value and finishing imperfect work quickly until you have to skills and platform to Go Big, it will be so much easier to keep going without suffering from fear or indecision. So set a goal and write this down on a piece of paper and say it to yourself everyday: “I give myself permission to create quickly and produce a lot of imperfect work. The only path to mastery is through the sea of the mediocre, and I will swim through it with tenacity, deliberation and effort – I expect it to be hard and frustrating, but once I’ve gone through the rough journey, I will reach the shores of professional success I deserve." Also, read these - even if you're not a writer, they support my ideology of creative production and why most people fail. - [The cardinal sin of self-publishing (from fool to magician)]( - [In defense of #amwriting (the story behind my tattoo)](  Thanks again! Derek Murphy, Creativindie [facebook]( [instagram]( [twitter]( [youtube](  PS. In the next email I’m going to throw down a gauntlet to challenge you creatively, so stay tuned. You might even have an epiphany moment. [Share to Facebook]( [Share to Twitter]( [Forward email]( Do not want to see it again? [Unsubscribe]( Derek Murphy [Creativindie.com]( | Portland, OR Location Independent - Usually in a castle or cabin.