Dave Wirth
Any project counts. Professional, creative, or personal projects. Anything. It could be learning the trumpet, trying out watercolors, putting together a power-point slideshow, or even taking a random photo of flowers and sharing it with everyone.
Ahem.
A very common reason why most people delay starting a new creative project (including yours truly—I am not beyond feeling the fear of starting) is the assumption that everything must be good in order to justify the effort.
Sometimes it's nice to be surprised, but if the result of a creative project doesn't turn out to be good, it can be wildly frustrating. We would think we were stupid for wasting our times on a bad such-and-such.
I might be in the minority about this, but why not aim to be satisfied instead? After all, good and bad are both judgments, and there is little incentive for us to continue to get better at a project after we label our work as such.
Being satisfied, or even dissatisfied, is different. If what we have created is satisfying, we'll savor our efforts, and sooner or later we'll let go so we can move onto the next project. What if what we create is unsatisfying? We could try to make it satisfying, or just try a different route to see if it turns out better. Or we could just as easily abandon it without a second thought.
Working to be satisfied seems a teeny-weeny-little-bit less harsh. Instead of the final product being a product to be viewed and judged, we could just aim for our efforts to be be satisfying to look at, to mull over, to gaze at, to listen to...
...to enjoy.
