In Search of Secrets

Hello, everybody! It’s time for yet another post about the importance of making garbage. I can’t seem to remind myself often enough.

Part of the reason this lesson is so difficult for me to remember is that I hate making mistakes. Well, everyone does–what’s special about me?

I think the simplest answer is “I’m a perfectionist.” Things that ought to feel like successes often still feel like failures because the goblin that lives in the back of my head sees everything that could have been better–you know, all the improvements I could’ve made if I’d actually worked hard at it–and deems those shortcomings “failures.”

(The goblin’s idea of “working hard” at something is dedicating unlimited time, energy, and spoons to it until it is physically impossible to make any further improvements. It is not a very fair goblin.)

So, I’m hypersensitive to my mistakes because the goblin (should I give it a name? Steve, maybe?) sees every mistake as proof of some inherent character flaw: laziness, ineptitude, a poor work ethic, etc. That’s the obvious, outward-facing side of the problem.

But there’s another side to the problem that’s much more insidious. Struggling–that is, leaving the comfort zone where I’m confident in my abilities–also feels like failure. The fact that something–anything–is beyond my abilities? Further proof of incompetence, says Steve. Which means the only accomplishments it allows me to feel proud of are the ones that were both flawless and effortless.¹

There’s just a teensy little problem with that: the sorts of things that can reliably produce that combination don’t feel like enough to earn a sense of accomplishment. Tiny, single-purpose programming functions; getting all the wrinkles out of the bedsheets; obsessing over what word to use until I find the one that carries the exact meaning I want; tweaking the structure of a story or poem until it flows juuuuuust right. Because these things don’t seem effortful, Steve insists that the sense of accomplishment I get from them is phony.

(Of course, I’m compelled to keep doing all those things anyway, because Steve does let me feel satisfaction and pride for them–it’s just that they’re always served with a piquant side of guilt for feeling proud of something so trivial.)

I’m left with a catch-22: if I struggle with something, I feel like a failure for having to struggle; if something’s easy, I feel like I haven’t earned any sense of accomplishment; and if something’s easy but I don’t get it perfectly right, I feel like a failure for not working hard enough.

I’m sort of trying to grope my way towards a solution here–something more concrete than just “keep making garbage.” As much as that reminder helps, I think it might help even more to recognize which type of “garbage” I feel like I’m making in the moment. Making something flawed and feeling like a failure for it is a kind of perfectionism I’ve known about and analyzed for a while–it’s the most stereotypical type–so it’s relatively easier to address. But the way in which struggle itself feels like failure, and the way guilt accompanies moments of small pride, are much more recent observations.

The counter for the guilt seems straightforward enough: catch myself completing small or easy-seeming tasks, and mindfully appreciate the satisfaction that comes with it. Because pride can come in small or large amounts, the feeling will be justified so long as it’s the appropriate amount. Guilt, in this case, is a wrong emotion: a signal to eliminate a feeling when I should be tuning it instead.

The counter for avoiding struggle…that one’s trickier. I can see the terrain, but not the path. The best thing I’ve thought of so far is retraining myself to see struggle as a sign of success rather than failure. All these essays about making garbage–they’ve been more focused on the “garbage” than the “making,” I think. (Which is why, in a later essay, I had to point out explicitly that making garbage only helps you improve if you’re trying not to make garbage.) But the verb is much, much more important than the noun! The garbage itself is just a by-product, it’s the making that helps you improve.

Why is this all so important? Of course I want to become a better writer, but aren’t there more pressing improvements I could be making?

Well, the thing is, because the verb is more important than the noun, “make garbage” generalizes. It’s really more like “do garbage”–in other words, make mistakes! Not because you’re not trying, not even because you’re human and mistakes are inevitable, but because perfection is a sign of stagnation. If you’re not making enough mistakes, you’re not struggling, and if you’re not struggling, you can’t grow.

Go forth, and do garbage!

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1. In retrospect, this explains a lot about how I play videogames. I was a big fan of the OG StarCraft and played a lot of it when I was a kid, but only the single-player campaigns. (I didn’t have any friends to play against online, and the idea of competing against strangers? WAY too scary. What if it was hard?) One of my favorite ways to play was to start a low-level mission (or use cheat codes on a harder one), then spend the majority of the mission systematically strip-mining the map of resources, razing each and every enemy building and unit to the ground, and just generally wiping it clean of anything that could conceivably be called a “task.” I would only move on the mission’s main objective when the map was as empty as I could make it, at which point I would descend on said objective with the largest and most powerful army I could possibly field.
   
   …It only just now occurs to me (consciously, that is) that this may well be the most unhinged possible way to play an RTS. I never go quite that hard anymore, but I’m definitely still a “completionist” gamer–I often feel like I haven’t really finished a game if I haven’t explored everything it has to offer. ↩︎