The work you just completed is never your best possible work.

I had a wonderful evening tonight – a reader of the site visiting Saigon reached out to me, and we spent five hours having coffee and discussing philosophy, writing, history, traveling, government, business… amazing guy. Great conversation. Really enjoyed it, the time flew.

Now, I tell you – this is a guy with amazing creative ability and insights. He’s spent a lot of time thinking about and researching and learning interesting things. He has a lot to share with the world.

Yet, he hasn’t released most of the writing he’s done. He’s a writer, and I’m guessing quite a solid writer – he reads a lot, writes a fair bit, and is a clear thinker, and that combination lends itself to solid writing. I’m almost certain he can at least write well enough that the writing doesn’t get in the way of the good insights, and he definitely has good insights.

But, he said to me – he’s looking to create timeless, masterpiece-level work, like the literature he really admires most.

I think that’s a tough thing to do, because of what I’m going to call “the creator’s curse” -

The work you just completed is never your best possible work.

Doing anything of significant magnitude means you’ll get better at your craft in the process. That means, as soon as you complete anything significant, you’ll notice how you could have done it better.

This seems to hold true of anything significant.

Some endeavors mean you can’t agonize after you finish. If you’re putting on an event, it happens at a fixed time and place. After you throw the event, you realize all the things you could have done differently to do a better event, but you can’t agonize over them – you just have to throw another event to put those ideas into motion.

But if you’re writing, painting, programming, composing, designing, anything like that – you could keep refining your work and never release it, and the work would keep improving. Every time you do significant work, you learn lessons and see how the work you created could be better.

This excerpt from “Art and Fear” on Coding Horror has burned the phrase “Quantity Always Trumps Quality” into my mind -

The 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.

The answer, I think, is to stop comparing your work to the standard of perfection – which you’ll never reach. Instead, start comparing your work to what else is potentially available. If what you’re working on potentially fills a need by people that isn’t totally fulfilled, then release it and let people start benefiting from it. You can make your next work better.

The work you just completed is never your best possible work.

It can’t be your best possible work, because doing anything significant means you just learned new lessons. But that’ll be true even if you go back and do it from scratch again. Release your work into the world, imperfect and all. Let it start fulfilling people’s needs. Keep improving, and make your next work even better.