Your [insert work here] sucks

So you want to write a book/paint a painting/compose a song/create a cocktail. I say, do it.

Are you not good enough? Will your product suck?

Probably.

And (not ‘but’) — I cannot stress this enough — WHO CARES?

DO IT ANYWAY. WRITE THE BOOK. PAINT THE PAINTING. COMPOSE THE SONG. CREATE THE COCKTAIL ANYWAY.

The main reason any of us don’t MAKE THE THING THAT IS NOT is that we’re afraid it’s not going to be any good, and the hard truth is that the huge majority of what we try to make won’t be very good. IT DOESN’T MATTER.

As I say in the book, we have been convinced by the culture in which we live that the glossy, seamless, perfect books/paintings/songs/cocktails we encounter as products are what art is Supposed To Be. We forget (or don’t realize) that the people who made these things make as many mistakes and have as many doubts as we do.

The difference is: They finished their Thing anyway.

But, Dale, I hear you protest feebly as you feel your safety crumbling around you, surely some people are more talented than others?

No doubt. I will never be Mozart, to point out just one area in which I come up short. But neither were the scores of “untalented but nevertheless competent composers who dotted the 18th-century landscape,” as Professor Peter Schickele always reminded us.

I have two points: First, those competent composers made up the environment that allowed Mozart to flourish. Without that scenius, without that music scene in Salzburg and Paris and Vienna and Venice and Prague, Mozart would have become a pool shark. Without the market for his musical genius, he would have vanished without a trace.

By making your crappy art, you are joining in the scene. By encouraging others to make their crappy art, you are creating the scene. None of us can flourish if none of us create.

Second point: WHO CARES? Is the world going to be a poorer place because you wrote a bad book? Are we going to be less rich because you composed a crappy song?

People, if we have survived Cats and Mama Mia! and any number of Michael Bay movies, the impact of any dreck that you create is unlikely to be statistically significant.

So, MAKE THE THING THAT IS NOT without fear that it’s going to be any good, or make you famous, or earn you wealth. It’s probably not going to.

Third point: But what if it does?

Start where you are.
Use what you have.
Do what you can.
Make the Thing That Is Not.
And then do it again.
Better.