Posts about Imperfection

As summer finally breaks and gives way to fall here in Canada, I’ve spent a lot of time at work. The fall is always a busy season for me. It feels like we’re all bracing to huddle up, buckle down, and close up shop for winter mentally.

In the mornings, I catch up on a little reading. I thought I’d share what stood out to me over the past couple weeks below:

1. Cabel Sasser’s talk at the last XOXO was incredibly inspiring. If you haven’t seen it, and you’re interested in art and what we leave behind, I implore you to watch it all the way through to the end.
2. Canada has a long heritage of good design. I’m not joking! There is great stuff everywhere. We have cool brand identities dominating our grocery store aisles. But there is almost nothing more Canadian than the CBC logo. Richard Baird’s retrospective on the history of the logo was illuminating and itself well designed. 
3. Dan Mall, one of the most pioneering digital designers working today, goes on a fall photography trip every year and shares his photos. His photos this year are stunning.
4. “I installed a box high up on a pole somewhere in the Mission of San Francisco. Inside is a crappy Android phone, set to Shazam constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It’s solar powered, and the mic is pointed down at the street below.” The Bob Spotter is cultural surveillance designed to capture the music that makes us bob our heads, without anyone’s consent, in an effort to graph our taste culturally rather than individually. I love this experiment; it reminds me of the internet of old. As Alex Cranz recently wrote for The Verge, the internet used to be for horny weirdos and college students, and Bob Spotter feels like it’s reminiscent of that time.
5. David Sparks noticed something at the British Museum in London: the ancient craftsmen were uninterested in perfection. They’re making art that is good enough, but even that art we call timeless. (There is hope for us yet.)
6. Stephen Robles, a YouTuber whose content I don’t watch, recently hit one hundred thousand subscribers. He made a video about getting started on making something with a key message: it’s never too late.
7. In what has clearly been a theme for me over the past two weeks, It’s Nice That published a feature about perfectionism and the way it helps and hurts us, seemingly simultaneously.
8. Nintendo has a music app now, in case you want to listen to any of their absolute bangers from a collection of classic games and franchises while you work.
9. On the topic of music, Apple published a press release this week about how it developed the new hearing aid feature for its AirPods Pro. Granted, this is just a press release, but it’s an inspiring story that reminds me some technology, even in our current age of AI consuming and subsuming all of humanity, is still worth being optimistic about.
10. I recently discovered Hyperessays, the home of Michel de Montaigne’s translated essays on the internet. They’re all very good, but so is the website’s design, which achieves the rarified status of feeling like you’re reading a book.
11. Tim Kreider’s 2012 essay ​“The Busy Trap” is a great read about separating ourselves from our work and our incomes. The entire thing is immensely quotable, the sort of thing you might read aloud to your spouse (if they were into that). My favourite quote is this: ​“The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.” This essay is as strong an argument for Universal Basic Income as any could be.

Until next time: stay relentless.

Recently, I’ve enjoyed a lot of Brandon Sanderson’s novels. If you don’t know who he is, he’s a popular fantasy author with a wildly optimistic outlook on people, and a knack for world building and magic systems. 

He’s also extremely prolific.

Since George R.R. Martin published Dance of Dragons in 2011 (the most recently published book in his Song of Ice and Fire series), Brandon Sanderson has published ten novels. (That’s not including his novellas.) Some of those books are lengthy tomes that take dozens of hours to read.

Not that Sanderson and George R.R. Martin are in a competition, but if they were, Sanderson wins the output competition. And, at this point, I think he’d win the quality competition. Sanderson is becoming a better writer all the time, and I think it’s because he writes constantly. (Quantity breeds quality.)

I thought about this in light of my own creative practice, of course, and wondered how somebody like Brandon Sanderson gets all that writing done. That’s a lot of words. It turns out, Sanderson’s website has a whole section about his process. He has a page about his daily word count and time goals that I found interesting:

I write every day, and I give myself wordcount goals. (Usually, it’s 2k min, or a certain page goal if revising). It varies though. 10 pages is often my goal. I usually hit it, and sometimes do much more… Also, some days I write for four or five hours – some days I write fourteen or sixteen… The truth is, I love what I do. So if I have time when I’m not doing something else, I work on books… Most days, usually, formally, I write from about noon until four, and then I’ll hang out with my family and do other stuff until about ten, and I’ll start writing from about ten until midnight. No from about ten until 4AM.

First, Sanderson writes a lot more than many other authors who have documented their process. Stephen King writes for four hours a day (his process also includes an afternoon nap, which sounds awesome).

Second, Sanderon’s word count is impressive. Two thousand words a day doesn’t sound like a lot, but two thousand words a day about stories and people you’ve conjured out of thin air is no picnic. Two thousand words is double what Stephen King writes in a day. (Again, this isn’t a competition, but it’s interesting to compare two prolific writers. King has written eighteen books since Dance of Dragons. His books are shorter, in case that’s not obvious. Later was an excellent read, in case you wonder if he’s still got it after all these years.)

Put all this aside, though, for just a minute: how do writers like Sanderson and King write this much, all the time? How do you show up every day?

Of course, Brandon Sanderson has something to say about that:

Writer’s block for me is where I’m a few chapters in and the story’s not flowing ​‚or I’m in the middle of the book somewhere and a chapter is just not working… I deal with it by writing the next part anyway, and it often doesn’t work, but I can set it aside and try it again the next day. I find that just writing it anyway, writing it poorly, and setting aside what I wrote and trying again fixes the problem almost every single time. 

Sanderson writes the hard part anyway, then moves on even though it stinks.

I know it sounds a lot like I’m saying ​“just do the work to be creative and you’ll get it done,” and that’s not helpful. But stay with me here: there are at least two takeaways from what Sanderson is saying that I think are immensely helpful.

1. Set aside a time in your day when you get to do your creative work. Stephen King writes the same four hours every day. On ​“most days,” Sanderson writes from noon to 4, then 10pm to midnight. Make an appointment on your calendar and keep it.
2. In that time period, don’t worry about perfection. Your first ​“draft” might stink. That’s why pencils have erasers, Adobe Illustrator has so many ​“Dupe” shortcuts, programmers have the Delete key, and writers have editors.

The hardest thing is point number one. Let’s say you have a 9 – 5, but you take photos in the evening. That sucks. The best light is gone when the sun is down. You have to come up with some creative ways to make a daily practice out of that, but this is a creative process — coming up with creative solutions to hard problems is the work.

Even if your day job is doing creative work — maybe you’re a freelancer like me — it’s still hard to find a consistent time. Trust me, people love meetings, and many clients are more interested in meeting with you than they are in your completion of their work.

But if you can find the time to show up every day, and keep that appointment with yourself, the second problem solves itself. Your first drafts get better. You get blocked less often. The mere act of showing up triggers your brain’s neurological pathways into doing the work.

The hard part is making the time to do your creative work. To do the stuff that matters. Don’t try to find the time. You won’t. You must make it for yourself.

Last week, my wife and I streamed Girl, Interrupted, which I hadn’t seen in about twenty years. There’s a moment where a psychologist explains the protagonist’s central problem: she is unnecessarily choosing to embrace her pain and live in a psychiatric institution: 

Quis hic locus?, quae regio?, quae mundi plaga? What world is this?… What kingdom?… What shores of what worlds? It’s a very big question you’re faced with, Susanna. The choice of your life. How much will you indulge in your flaws? What are your flaws? Are they flaws?… If you embrace them, will you commit yourself to hospital?… for life?

I immediately rewrote this quote in my mind to be less negative: The choice of your life is this: What are your flaws? Are they flaws? Will you embrace them and embrace yourself?

Naturally, this whole thing reminded me of the creative process, which to me is about embracing ourselves and our imperfections. If we can’t accept our flaws, we’ll never make anything worthwhile. I think we can create from a good place or a bad place, but each unique creation of ours bears the signature flaws that make us unique. So if we want to commit ourselves to doing good creative work for all our lives, we have to embrace our flaws. 

Of course, the central question is, are they flaws?

Like many things in life, non-western cultures are much better at this. The Japanese allow imperfection and accept it in all things, including art. They even have a word for it: wabi-sabi. For them, something isn’t beautiful unless it is imperfect, or impermanent, or incomplete. I’m struck that we as humans are all imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. We want to find things that remind us of ourselves.

Traditional Hebrew rabbis encourage the admittance of imperfection. As Rabbi Ari Lev writes, ​“And amidst our imperfections may we have the courage and compassion to to say to ourselves, Hinein — Here I am, I am not perfect, but I am very good.” (Modern western Christianity barely has a basic understanding of this concept and has made ignoring it a cottage industry of theirs.)

The flaw in my work, or maybe the flaw within myself, is a fear of impermanence. I have struggled with the impermanence of my work for years. I design websites and web apps for a living. They have a life cycle of somewhere around seven minutes before some executive gets the brilliant idea that a redesign will fix all their problems, which is disheartening when you spend months or even years of your life working with clients on large projects.

But wabi-sabi: embrace your flaws, and embrace the flaws in your work.

To counter this, I make music. I record it. I share it. I have a little Youtube channel, and a Patreon, and a Bandcamp page, all that junk. In my mind, it’s evergreen: a piece of music lasts a lot longer than most websites. The music I make and put on Youtube will be as valuable in 2033 as it is in 2023. 

Every week, I spend at least one day a week just making music. It keeps me sane when I make something as impermanent as a website the next day.

What are your flaws? Are they flaws? Will you embrace them and embrace yourself?