Early Work

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

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

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.

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

But there is another more sinister reason people dismiss new ideas. If you try something ambitious, many of those around you will hope, consciously or unconsciously, that you'll fail. They worry that if you try something ambitious and succeed, it will put you above them. In some countries this is not just an individual failing but part of the natio... See more

Unfortunately, if you want to do new things, you'll face a force more powerful than other people's skepticism: your own skepticism. You too will judge your early work too harshly. How do you avoid 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.