A more potent teacher than any amount of speculation

I recently recorded an album in which three songs were cut in the eleventh hour.

This happens on all of my records, and it’s always a bittersweet moment. It’s my least favorite part of the process.

Because no songwriter enjoys killing their darlings. Blech. It turns my stomach like a salad spinner. It kills me to reject this thing that I worked so hard on.

But the bottom line is, that song is simply not good enough to make the final album. I feel proud and happy that I wrote it, and there is value in it, but unfortunately, it’s goodbye my love. Your candle has shined a brief but glorious light, and now we must say goodbye.

But process is important, because stimulates growth. Grappling with my own challenges, making hard independent decisions, having experiences and learning from my mistakes, and becoming more resilient along the way, that’s where I make meaning in this life.

And not everyone is like that. My preference is for solitary refinement and independent growth. I value autonomy and want the freedom to work according to my own standards.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate other people’s perspectives on my ideas, it’s just that I would rather rely on my own judgment, intuition and experience. That’s more satisfying to me. Whereas going back and forth in a constant feedback loop, only to implement external edits to improve the work by twenty percent, isn’t the best use of my time and energy. I don’t want to diminish trust in my own instincts.

Now, in my experience, too many creators are too reliant on external input. Their boundaries are so porous, that they wind up confused, indecisive, unoriginal, unexpressed and insecure when it comes to their own voice.

I have lost track of the number of times a peer of mine has written something deeply personal, hired an expensive editor, watched their baby get torn to shreds, and never ended up publishing the damn thing.

Maybe they got scared into submission from the feedback.

Maybe they became overwhelmed at the prospect of rewriting.

Maybe they simply lost momentum and never got back on the horse after their initial rejection.

Maybe they went back and pored over each sentence with the precision of a jeweler, and ran out of money and energy.

Every time this happens, my heart breaks a little more. It kills me to watch people over optimizing for quality, rather than focusing on momentum.

I’m not saying they should publish garbage. But if they allow doubt to diminish their pace, there will never be a palpable sense of progress with their work.

Yes, we learn from our mistakes, but I we learn even more from the act of finishing and starting anew. We grow from throwing ourselves out there to see if our ideas survive contact with the marketplace.

In fact, I would argue that the person who launches ten projects in a year will learn more and grow faster than the person who launches one project in ten years. It’s basic math. Improvement comes not from meticulous refinement of a single effort, but from cumulative experience gained from creating a body of work.

And that’s impossible to achieve if you’re too reliant on external input.

The good news is, when you optimize for momentum, quality happens on its own. It’s impossible for it not to. Consistently executing can’t help but lead to incrementally elevating. Once you’re moving and gaining momentum, it takes significantly less effort to keep moving. Which means you can redirect your efforts to improving the work while letting the kinetic energy do its thing.

That doesn’t work the other way around. If you over index on quality at the wrong time, that’s no guarantee of momentum. It probably negates it.

Actual experience, with all its potential for failure, embarrassment, and learning, is a more potent teacher than any amount of speculation.

If you really want to grow as an artist, then you don’t need more feedback. You need to throw yourself off a cliff.

Do you learn more from your mistakes, or from the act of finishing and starting anew?