#3 The happy accident of great creative work

I do not control the quality of my creative work, but my perfectionist tendencies like to think I do.

My perfectionisms thinks that I can simply “do better”—or ”try harder”—and produce great work.

But I can’t sit down and decide, “Today I’m going to write a brilliant Substack post.”

I can’t wake up one morning and think, “Okay, time to write an absolute masterpiece.”

Why? Two reasons: I don’t know what quality is, and I don’t know how to achieve it.

And—I’m sorry to say—neither do you.

But realizing our lack of control is the first step in releasing our perfectionism, and actually producing work.

What is quality?

What makes a creative work “great”?

Ask a hundred people, and you’ll probably get a hundred different answers. You can reduce most of those to a simple idea: “It resonates with me.” Or: “It makes me feeling something.” Or, simplest of all: “I like it.”

Let’s roll with that last definition. We all aspire to do creative work that people like. Even if that’s not a primary goal, it certainly is a desirable outcome, whether that’s 1, 100, or 1,000,000 people.

But even with that definition, we do not know what quality actually is, because we don’t know what people will like. Not with any certainty.

We may have a good idea of what we like in a piece of art, and we might have pretty good instincts of whether other people will feel the same… but it’s all just guesswork. Educated guesswork, that we improve at as we get better at our craft and more in tune with our audience… but it’s all just an approximation.

How do we achieve quality?

Even if we knew exactly what other people wanted, the exact feelings they are looking to experience through our work… we wouldn’t know how to create it.

Not with any precision. Again, we might have good guesses. If you’re writing a novel, you might guess that if you give the audience a hero to cheer for, who is likeable and plucky and who struggles, suffers, and triumphs, then the audience will resonate with the story. Or it might fall flat.

After all, do you know exactly what makes a character likeable? Is it reducible to a formula? Can you reduce an affecting painting to a formula? I doubt it.

So we can’t know what the audience wants, and we can’t control whether we give it to them. Yet we still want to do great work. Where does that leave us?

The happy accident

A creative work that resonates with anyone is a happy accident. It is the coincidental overlap of what the audience wants and what our work contains.

We cannot control whether that accident happens. But we can influence the likelihood of it occurring.

How? Think of a hunter who sets out in search of a deer. He doesn’t control whether he will have success or not. Maybe the deer will simply be elsewhere, through no fault of his own, or will elude his grasp.

But he does have influence over his chances. By training his instincts, by sharpening his skills, he improves his ability to find and approach the deer. He gives himself the best possible chance at a clear shot. And then he fires.

Training is about repetition. The more he hunts, the better he gets. The quality of the hunt is beyond his control. But the quantity of practice is not.

Yet if the hunter refuses to start the hunt until he has some guarantee that he will have success… if he insists on waiting for the “perfect” hunt… then he’ll never get there.

So forget about quality. Focus on quantity, and wait for the right kind of accident to occur.