Being okay with being terrible

<!––>

Lately, in addition to blogging and podcasting every day, I’ve been recording short videos and uploading them to YouTube.

These vlogs are pretty bad. I address the camera from my cramped little home office—a talking head with a weird-looking haircut. My ramshackle light rig casts a yellow, washed-out pall over my face. I deliver this scripted, stilted little speech, often spouting half-baked ideas. Very few viewers ever see these sad little videos; as I record this, yesterday’s episode has a grand total of one view. One.

Making something mediocre, let alone something that’s genuinely bad, is difficult for me. I’m very much a type-A personality; I was the kid who mourned every A-minus and who restarted a piano piece every time he hit a wrong wrong note.

And it’s not hard to see the flaws in what I’m posting, particularly when I compare it to others’ work on the web. Lately I’ve been watching a lot of Casey Neistat, vlogger king. His work makes me feel simultaneously jealous and ashamed. I feel jealous because he’s so damn good at what he does. And I feel ashamed because Casey and I are almost the exact same age (we were literally born just four days apart). Two thirty-six-year-olds, one who does amazing, admired work, and one who… doesn’t.

This self-critical, all-or-nothing mindset has sabotaged my creative impulse before. I have abandoned a half-dozen online projects when I wasn’t satisfied with either the quality of the result or the (nonexistent) audience reaction. My latent perfectionism sabotaged the daily discipline, grinding the machine to a halt.

The only difference so far this time around is that I’m pushing through that discouragement and trying to ignore the results. In short, I’ve learned to be okay with being terrible. I’ve decided to just keep making stuff, whether it’s mediocre or not. ■