When I spend 100 hours working to create a photograph, I produce a finished product. It’s tangible. It’s also permanent: I get to look at it forever, anybody can see it, and I can even sell copies of it.
All of those things disappear when I don’t finish. If I decided to spend 101 hours, or 200 hours, or 500 hours, and never decided that was enough, I don’t have a finished product. I have a negative or a digital file that, for almost all purposes, doesn’t exist. It’s not permanent. Nobody else can see it. I certainly can’t sell copies of it.
But even worse, not shipping robs me of credibility. I can’t call myself a photographer if, when you ask to see my work, I can’t point you to it. If I did, you’d either think I was a liar, or crazy.
If you’re going to put the effort into something to almost finish, just finish. Even if you think you could do better. Even if you’re not totally pleased with it. If the choice is shipping it or letting it languish, shrouded from the world because you think it’s 98% or 95% or 90% completed, ship it. Then move on.
As Louis C.K. explains, it’s how you become great:
I spent 15 years as a comedian, going in a circle that went nowhere. I hated my act, I had been doing the same hour of comedy for 15 years…and it was shit, I promise you. […]
I was sitting in my car after the show [in a Chinese restaurant] , just feeling like this was all a big mistake: I’m just not good enough; I felt like my jokes were a trap.
In the car I listened to a CD of George Carlin talking about comedy, talking about it seriously.
The thing that blew me away about this fellow was that he kept putting out specials. Every year there would be a new George Carlin special, a new George Carlin album. How did he do it? It made me literally cry, that I could never do that. I did the same jokes for 15 years.
On the CD they ask him, how do you write all this material? And he says, each year I decide I’d be working on that year’s special, then I’d do that special, then I would throw away that material and start again with nothing. And I thought, that’s crazy, how do you throw away? It took me fifteen years to build this shitty hour, and if I throw it away, I got nothing.
But he gave me the courage to try it — and also I was desperate, what else would I do?
This idea that you throw everything away and you start over again. After you are done telling jokes about airplanes and dogs, you throw them away. What do you have left? You can only dig deeper. You start talking about your feelings and who you are. And then you do those jokes until they’re gone. You gotta dig deeper. So then you start thinking about your fears and your nightmares and doing jokes about that. And then they’re gone. And then you start going into just weird shit.
It’s a process that I watched him do my whole life. And I started to try and do it.
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THIS is the reason why I love CK. The myth of perfection causes far too many of us to not even try, to give up unless we’ve reached some imaginary standard of perfection. I’ve always admired CK’s guts in doing one blockbuster show at the end of the year, then scrapping everything and starting over again.