Make It Beautiful Anyway
When you have poured your heart into building something but there’s no applause waiting for you, do you break down completely or resent the world for not appreciating you? Would you do it all over again? I have struggled with this question a lot. In creative pursuits, it is easier to fall in love with the craft, so you don’t care whether the applause comes or not. The craft is enough.
Routine life is not that simple. I have a habit of pouring my heart into everything I do because I want things to be efficient and beautiful. Those are the words I live by. First, I strive for maximum efficiency in the process; then I simplify it until it becomes effortlessly beautiful. But oftentimes, these efforts are read as “too much” or “unnecessary.” I understand the pragmatic argument, but it completely misses the aesthetic side of things.
There are times when I work tirelessly to make something beautiful. The very virtue of efficiency is that it makes things look simple and effortless. This often sends the wrong message: perhaps the task was easier than it looked. And so the applause never comes. That can be frustrating.
I have started treating every task as a personal project, as a craft. I treat everything as an opportunity to surpass my previous work. Whenever I am working on something, I have a little competition in my head: How can I make it more efficient? How can I make it more visually appealing? Those questions have taught me a lot about design, because design is where aesthetics and efficiency truly come together.
The applause will come when they try to mimic you out of envy. That’s when they realise that what looked simple wasn’t so simple. Then they will applaud you. Or maybe they won’t, out of envy, which is completely fine.
Imagine living a life where you are always surpassing your previous benchmark, and that benchmark was established by surpassing the one before it.
A life lived in pursuit of objective beauty and internal coherence is perhaps the most satisfying life to live. Applause is just validation. It’s good when it happens, but it does not help you in your pursuit.