The Mess That Makes You
Anything beautiful in the world requires embracing the ugliness that precedes it. We must learn to accept the messy side of things.
A beautiful sculpture appears beautiful only in its final moments. For most of its making, it remains unformed and therefore messy. The beauty exists only in the mind of the creator and nowhere else. He must trust that vision and impose it upon a block of marble.
Our lives are shaped in a similar way. When we begin something new, from investing to building a business, it appears unruly and unformed, far messier than it ever did in our imagination. For a long time, we must learn to make peace with what is unfinished. This can sometimes overwhelm us, to the point where we begin to doubt whether we can ever create something beautiful.
Self-doubt, frustration, and feeling overwhelmed are also part of the process. You must constantly remind yourself that everything beautiful requires work. It requires embracing the ugliness. It is only by working through the ugliness that you arrive at the beautiful.
Because growth does not look perfect. It is a story of becoming, of transforming something mundane into something worth looking at. Embrace everything. Nothing in life worth achieving is easy. It is not supposed to be. Whoever offers you shortcuts is a swindler and a fraud.
Learning anything new and building anything new is an arduous process. It is meant to be. How else will you carve a path for yourself without the act of carving? It is tedious, and at times it has the potential to break you. It teaches you to embrace failures, accept bad drafts, befriend the unfinished version of yourself, and learn to sit with demotivation and discouragement.
The true joy lies in moving past this tedious phase and arriving at the finished work. The satisfaction of overcoming is precisely what brings joy to creation. Ask any writer and they will tell you how much they love writing, but ask them whether the process is fun and they will disagree. Creation is never supposed to be easy. If it is easy, you are likely doing it wrong.
Most of the time, we hesitate to begin because we are afraid to face the messy output. We are so accustomed to consuming finished products that we forget they too became finished through this same process.
So if you are caught in self-loathing, thinking you are not good enough, remind yourself that none of them were good enough either. They had to become so. And that is only possible when you embrace the not-good-enough parts of yourself.