Your good taste is ruining everything

You don't create because your standards are too high

We either are this person or we know this person. I’m thinking of a specific friend. She’s a talented writer. She has ideas. She has something to say. But she’s also extremely self-aware and culturally educated, and it’s holding her back.

This friend can’t create because her own critical voice is in her head. She appreciates art of all kinds and has strong opinions about it. And unfortunately, her own work isn’t exempt from her keen eye. She doesn’t create things because she has too high standards for herself. And even worse, it’s obvious she wants to. She looks on with envy while friends of hers write and publish their work. She exudes a restless dissatisfaction because there’s something in her she isn’t giving air to.

There’s an opening line in a Mitski song that always makes me emotional:

“I cry at the start of every movie. I guess I just wish I was making things too, but I’m working for the knife.”

People speculate about what “the knife” represents in this song, but it seems obvious: The knife is perfectionism. Even Mitski, who has actually “made things” more than the average person, knows how this goes. When perfectionism becomes self-sabotage, and the internal critic is so strong that we never give ourselves permission to start or finish anything.

This is a paradox I see often in creative people. Because they know what good looks like, they’re paralyzed by the space between their vision and their current execution. And yet the only way to get better is keep doing what they consider “bad” work. Ira Glass talks about this in his famous piece, “The Gap.” We all experience the gap between our expectations and our execution, and some of us work to slowly close that gap. Others never try. The gap looks too wide, too scary, so they sit on one side of it looking with self-resentment and longing at the other side. The self-censorship is painful enough, but then we see someone else doing what we convinced ourselves not to. And oof, does that hurt.

“In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The irony of the whole thing is that to create work that meets our own standards, we first have create work that doesn’t. Let yourself be delusional and a little embarrassing. Feeling a little cringe and even bad at something is so much better than the restless dissatisfaction of never letting yourself try.

Good taste is worth pursuing. Our high expectations push us to keep getting better, as long as they don’t prevent us from beginning in the first place.

Make the thing and hate it. Make it and never share it with anyone. Just make it. You will likely never reach the high standards you’ve set for yourself. This is the creative’s curse. But isn’t the beauty more in the trying, anyway?