Shit Work

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.
– Thomas Edison

The last couple posts have been kind of a bitch to get done. When I sat down to write, there wasn’t any momentum – my ideas were sort of vague or old news, my wording was lazy and cliche. I put down a lot of words that I ended up deleting. I wrote the equivalent of three or four posts, then tossed them completely because they just weren’t good.

I was doing shit work, below my own level. You can usually tell when this is happening – you’re not getting things done as quickly as usual, you’re not satisfied, and nobody’s impressed with your finished product. Happens all the time, and it’s annoying.

I’ve been going through that lately at the gym, as well. Throwing punches I know are ugly, screwing up submissions or defenses, forgetting steps in complex drills or just doing them wrong. Only tonight did I finally start to get the hang of the back roll we do in warm ups, and then we added another move and I’m back to the old routine: try, nope, not quite. Try again, nope, didn’t get it. Try again, too slow. Try again, too fast. Try again – worse than the first time. Repeat until time’s up.

Sometimes this happens because you’re tired, distracted, or lazy. Sometimes it happens because you’re stuck in a bad project or you don’t know what’s next.  Sometimes it just happens, and you can’t figure out why and you can’t see a way to fix it.

Here’s my advice. Think of this as paying your dues. Only 10% of your writing is good? Write ten times as much and you’ll have all the quality output you need. You only got that move perfect once in an hour, and you need to get it perfect 1000 times before you’ll be comfortable? No big deal, you’re only 999 hours away now. There’s only a 3% chance you land your dream job? Apply to 33 of them and your odds look pretty good.

If you can see every single failure as a positive step towards your goal, setbacks and shitty results won’t slow you down at all – they’ll speed you up.

Do your shit work. Write the million mediocre words you need to uncover the perfect 100,000. Throw ten thousand shitty punches, take a thousand bad falls, get turned down one hundred times, lose ten games, get fired once (hell, get divorced.) When you see every shitty result as a critical component of your masterpiece, you won’t mind. You might find you like honest failure nearly as much as success.

(Progress: bought a mouth guard.)