Early Work

Another way to get through the lame phase of ambitious projects is to surround yourself with the right people — to create an eddy in the social headwind. But it's not enough to collect people who are always encouraging. You'd learn to discount that. You need colleagues who can actually tell an ugly duckling from a baby swan.

If you overestimate the importance of what you're working on, that will compensate for your mistakenly harsh judgment of your initial results.

The thing you're trying to trick yourself into believing is in fact the truth. A lame-looking early version of an ambitious project truly is more valuable than it seems. So the ultimate solution may be to teach yourself that.

One way to do it is to study the histories of people who've done great work.

Imagine if we could turn off the fear of making something lame. Imagine how much more we'd do.

One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame. And this fear is not an irrational one.

It can help if you focus less on where you are and more on the rate of change. You won't worry so much about doing bad work if you can see it improving. Obviously the faster it improves, the easier this is. So when you start something new, it's good if you can spend a lot of time on it. That's another advantage of being young: you tend to have bigg... See more

One motivation that works particularly well for me is curiosity. I like to try new things just to see how they'll turn out.

This is a difficult problem, because you don't want to completely eliminate your horror of making something lame. That's what steers you toward doing good work. You just want to turn it off temporarily, the way a painkiller temporarily turns off pain.