In the ten or so years I’ve been shooting photos, I cannot tell you how many I’ve taken. Not because the number is so staggeringly large (it’s probably under 100,000) but because I’ve deleted so many I have no way to keep an accurate tally anymore. If you were to look through the ones that I’ve deemed “good enough” to keep, you’d probably say that most of them sucked. This culling process is one of the reasons there are only 85 photographs on my website, spread across 5 different categories. Still, looking at that site now, with nearly a year between today and my last significant photography project, I could easily cut half the shots featured there.
But, that’s the nature of creative work. Nobody produces all masterpieces. In a medium like photography, creating great work means producing a lot of work. When Ansel Adams was still a full time professional landscape photographer, he used to say he was doing great if he got 12 significant images per year. In a medium like writing, creating great work means not only producing a lot of work, but doing even more editing. Honing ideas, stories, scenes, and phrases until they are as good as they can reasonably be. Even though most of your output may suck, with enough refinement, you can eventually produce something fantastic.
When Mark Parker took over as Nike’s CEO, he called Steve Jobs for advice. Jobs said,
“Just one thing. Nike makes some of the best products in the world. Products that you lust after. But you also make a lot of crap. Just get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff.”
Parker knew Jobs was right: “We had to edit” he said.
In 1998, Steve Jobs whittled Apple’s product line down from 350 to 10. That meant Apple could focus all its energy on making 10 incredibly well designed products, instead of 3 great products, 20 good products, 100 mediocre products, and 227 crappy products. It seems like its worked out pretty well.
If your goal is to produce outstanding work, in any field, recognize that most of what you produce is going to suck. To get from “suck” to “awesome” takes a huge amount of effort and skill. If you’re a landscape/wedding/street/bird/extreme-sports photographer, you’re chances of producing great work in any one of these areas is pretty slim, and the odds of producing great work in all five is almost nil. If you’re a software company that’s trying to cram in every last feature possible, maybe you would be better served by making a few key features outstanding.
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I love this post. Sometimes I feel guilty for not being more disciplined enough to churn out a few posts a week like some of my peers. But when I do write, I spend hours to craft my content. I’ll spend hours researching so that I can present a well curated and creative post on a topic. And I can only hope that in the long run the sparseness and sporadic posting will be appreciated for what it is.
Thanks for reading and commenting Pashmina. I think good work will always be appreciated if it keeps getting out there. The trick is to not get discouraged when you produce bad work. Everyone does. People who are great at anything generally don’t release their bad work, but you can be sure that they produce it. The key is the hard work between the bad work and the good finished product.
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Like Pashmina, I feel less guilty after reading this post even though I’m not at all a fan of Steve Jobs. Writing is less about having words appear on the screen as it is about cutting and condensing and the general overall editing process. I don’t take a lot of time editing my online whatever it is, but that’s more so because writing is a process and the things I have to turn in or submit for something, I take the time to think about more carefully. At the same time, sometimes when you spend 30 minutes plus thinking about one sentence, it tends to become overkill.
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Great advice. I think that’s why we need to focus. The world seems to award effort that is focused and incrementally improves itself.
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Thank you for posting this article. To quote Aristotle “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.â€
One of the things I have been struggling with is not tracking daily goals but being committed to them. Based on this we developed our own spin on daily goal tracking at Non Zero Day ( https://www.nonzeroday.com ) where we not only track daily goals but set daily commitments to stay accountable and turn your daily goals into habits.
I would to talk if you have any questions about it!