Early Work

We just don't have enough experience with early versions of ambitious projects to know how to respond to them. We judge them as we would judge more finished work, or less ambitious projects. We don't realize they're a special case.

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

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.

Perhaps if you study enough such cases, you can teach yourself to be a better judge of early work. Then you'll be immune both to other people's skepticism and your own fear of making something lame. You'll see early work for what it is.

It will be easier to try out a risky project if you think of it as a way to learn and not just as a way to make something. Then even if the project truly is a failure, you'll still have gained by it.

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.

For some it might work to rely on sheer discipline: to tell yourself that you just have to press on through the initial crap phase and not get discouraged. But like a lot of "just tell yourself" advice, this is harder than it sounds. And it gets still harder as you get older, because your standards rise. The old do have one compensating advantage t... See more

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.

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