Ideas slip faster than you think.
You’ll have to produce your bad ideas until your best ideas come to life.
Like a tap water, you have to first get rid of impurities before seeing clean water.
Most people fear to be publicly embarrassed, but the truth is you’ll most likely have to be publicly embarrassed before being publicly praised. Specially in the case of anything that is utterly subjective like creative work.
Something that always messes with my thinking is that if I wait on any piece of work, I shall make it more compelling, in an attempt to bring it a step closer to perfection. But then time passes and I lose interest, which is pretty much normal because not acting quickly on an inspiration will let it sure slip down. And then the work is doomed.
So because there are infinite number of ways to refine your work, you do what’s feasible given your attention budget and time budget. You try to fit as much in this window, because it will 100% pass and you’ll lose interest sooner than you expect. Done is always better than perfect. Overthink the details and your work will never see the light of day. You’ll never fail, which means you’ll never succeed.
Often the end goal for any type of work is to produce something that looks so simple people think someone should’ve sure done it sometime. The more effort & complexity put behind the scenes, the more seamless & lean the end product is. Now if you skipped the complex part, you wouldn’t know what this feels any other way. So most of the time, your job is not only producing work. It’s producing work with enough complexity given all the constraints.