Let’s be honest, no one does anything badly intentionally – unless you’re a teenager who wants to get out of doing the bins or emptying the dishwasher.
No one ever creates a movie hoping that it’ll be a steaming mess that no one wants to touch.
No one fires up their laptop hoping to write an article or a book with the intent of vexing their readers enough that they’ll never read a thing they ever write again.
But you know something? We still do it.
And that leaves us with a problem.
None of us wants to create something bad, it’s always the opposite. But having this fear at the back of our mind never allows us to take a path that hasn’t been taken before – we play it safe.
And sometimes even playing it safe, doesn’t guarantee being successful.
So, why bother?
Back in 1995, a very young Barry stood in awe watching one of his idols, David Bowie, playing live on stage.
There’s many a thing you could say about David Bowie, playing it safe wasn’t one of them.
As I watched him singing his heart out, standing in a pair of hybrid high heel shoes, he epitomised the notion of trying to hit it out of the park at every opportunity. – He didn’t always achieve that.
He probably pissed off his older fans with his later day route into drum and bass and all the bells and whistles he threw into his later albums. – But you could never say that he stood still and was just mass produced more of what worked before, he didn’t.
I don’t know if he started every musical project with the title of this blog post in mind, but his thoughts probably weren’t far away from it. And so should you.
When you start every project knowing it’ll be bad, it takes all the pressure off you.
You’re not creating something for critical acclaim, it’s an itch that needs to be scratched. And if you don’t scratch it, it’s going to bug you for weeks to come.
You’re not afraid of tackling things you haven’t tried before, because you’ve got nothing to lose with being bad at it.
You take the limitations off your mind and go with what it gives you, rather than filtering the content that flows to your fingers.
And you also know that it’s something that can be fixed and polished into shape, rather than looking it as already perfect and not knowing what to do with it when it’s not.
Why not try it out today?
Don’t be surprised if you take on take on projects you always feared of doing, take your business in directions you never though of going, and producing more content than you did before, because you’re not constantly editing the little you have into so called perfection.
I’ll also let you in on a little secret, nobody remembers your bad stuff.
But boy do they remember your good stuff.
