Greatness Is Built On Bad Drafts
We all fall into the perfection trap without even noticing it. Every time we try to pursue something new, we make the mistake of comparing someone else’s expert phase with our beginner phase. We see someone articulating their thoughts beautifully and conclude that we can never achieve this, that they must be uniquely gifted. What we conveniently ignore is that they have hundreds, possibly thousands, of iterations behind them.
We are overly conscious of our failures, and this prevents us from creating bad drafts of anything. Everybody wants to be a content creator, but nobody wants to create bad videos. Everybody wants to be a writer, but nobody wants to deal with bad drafts or look like an idiot in front of a blank page. This is not a side quest of the game. This is the whole game.
The path to greatness runs straight through embarrassment. You have to allow yourself to fail enough times to become good. The only requirement is to fail creatively. That means not failing in the exact same way each time. Observe the failure, identify its causes, figure out potential solutions, and try again. This iterative process gradually moves you closer to mastery.
Ask your friends or family what you are good at. It might be something as trivial as “making excuses.” You can only become good at making excuses if you have made a lot of bad ones. Those poorly executed attempts and failures become data points that show you what does not work. Once you eliminate what does not work, you are left with what does.
Thomas Edison famously said that he had not failed, but had simply found ten thousand ways that would not work. This captures the essence of iterative failure. When you keep failing while pursuing something life transforming, it often means you are getting closer, because you are no longer repeating the same mistakes. Not repeating past failures means you have already succeeded in fixing them. That realization itself becomes fuel to continue.
We should not obsess over failure. It is inevitable. When we stop treating failure as a personal flaw and start treating it as data, embarrassment loses its power. Create many bad drafts. Fail creatively. That is the path to greatness. Want to be good at something? Do it repeatedly until you understand how to do it right.