Why Creators Secretly Hate The Very Thing They’re Building
We the creator love our finished product. It’s our chance to finally point at the once discombobulated, but now neatly packaged thing we’ve been slaving over for months and months.
But we the creator secretly hate to share a finished product too. Because it’s also the time when the culmination of days of sweat and stress are dumbed down to a singular moment where people will finally judge our work.
And therein lies the rub.
In order to get a big project done, we have to simplify the steps along the way. But once we finish, we have to simplify the big project so people know what we just did.
This opens ourselves up to the risk of having someone look at our work, shrug, and say, “Meh.”
Eesh. We hate Meh. We’ll do anything to avoid Meh. Meh is what makes creators temporarily murderous. (Murderous in a metaphorical sense of course, right?...Cricket...cricket)
So, we creators rock back and forth from dreaming, to doing, to doing just enough to keep the dream alive. Because we secretly hate what comes with a finished product and the baby steps that get us there.
And yet for the creator it truly is: simplify or die.
If you can’t simplify your approach, you won’t have a product to sellIf you can’t simplify your message, no one will buy your product.
Let’s look at this Porsche ad for instance:
Thousands of hours of engineering and testing gets put into one finished car, in one photo, which is marketed with one sentence.
Simplifying isn’t simple.
The work always takes longer than you want it to and the reveal is always more terrifying than it should be.
So What Are We To Do?
Don’t fall in love with a magical idea and what something will look like when you finish, fall in love with making progress towards an idea you currently have.
Because if you don’t:
you won’t allow yourself to inch forward through discovery
you won’t respect your creation enough to risk sharing it
and you won’t be able to explain simply what it does, because you’ll be too attached on what you wished it would have done or what you think it still might do...someday.Simplify for the sake of progress, and let the chips fall where they may.
