All or Nothing
And the Great Gulf Between
I have changed the Shelf Life font. Not that you will notice, you receive this newsletter in whatever font Substack gives you or really whatever font you want. The end-user reading experience in electronic media is malleable. But I’ve changed the Shelf Life font on my end, in my writing suite. My writing suite is Google Docs so I don’t have a lot of choices. The new font is Cambria, which sounds like a university whose tuition I cannot afford. The old Shelf Life font was Calibri, which sounds like a tropical bird who has a rather attractive beak. C fonts only for Catherine.
I have funny stories about fonts from my time in book publishing including stories about Papyrus and Minion Condensed. Minion Condensed is an honorary C font. It is a very good font. The entire Minion font family is a work of art. ITC Garamond Condensed Book is a fair substitute if you don’t want to shell out for Minion. I accidentally toggled a button on Adobe’s website while I was looking at all the different Minion faces and I think they just charged my credit card like $6,000.
Anyway I thought I ought to let you know that my voice changed even though you won’t be able to tell on your end. Just keep that information in your back pocket. Everything looks more important in a serif font. Today’s Shelf Life is not more important than any other day’s Shelf Life. I just felt like a different font after writing like 120 of these in Calibri. This is my favorite part of the essay to write, the nonsense part you have to scroll past to get to anything worthwhile. It’s like the story of that cold, wintery day when a homemaker first made stroganoff from scratch that you have to skim over to get to the recipe.
Today’s article is about the all-or-nothing mentality that a lot of us have when it comes to—all kinds of things. Writing is one of these things, but certainly not the only one. I instinctively take an all-or-nothing approach to pretty much everything I do in my life. Everything I create, every interaction I participate in, every performance of any kind: It was amazing and genius or it was abjectly terrible. There is no between. There is no effort of my own that I look at and think “enh, it’s okay.”
I’m retraining my brain on this right now: I’m working on evaluating my own efforts—at anything—less critically and more objectively, the way I’d evaluate anyone else’s effort, instead of holding myself to an unreasonable standard. This is only the latest thing my brain is relearning; another recent example is ceasing the use of mental health references as pejoratives as I discussed in Redirection Insurrection. I do this brain training a lot to modify my behavior.
Raise your hand if you’ve said—or if you routinely say—any of these things:
I’m my own harshest critic.
I’m a perfectionist.
I won’t settle for less than what I know I am capable of.
Okay I admit I was not prepared for how disproportionately large the bullet would be in Cambria. Maybe this was all a terrible mistake. Also, I can no longer gauge my word count by how much space I have filled. What have I done?
For those of us with creative pursuits or, you know, anxiety disorders, those phrases above are probably a common brain refrain. If our efforts do not measure up to the arbitrary standard of quality we set for ourselves, then they are worthless and belong in the garbage.
This isn’t just me, right? When I write something, I can’t seem to recognize that it might be mediocre or need work to reach its potential (which all first drafts do). If I can’t look at it and see a perfect work of genius, then it’s trash and I’m ashamed of it and I never want to let anyone else read it. If I put my makeup on and it’s not perfect, I can’t let it go. I have to take it off and do it again. If I sew a dress and it doesn’t come out looking like something I could have bought in a store, then I feel like I’ve failed in my endeavor.
A very long time ago now, in what is still one of my favorite Shelf Life articles (To Do Something Well), I wrote about my roller derby experience and how it helped break down this wall. I took up roller skating after age thirty, having not skated since I was a preteen. And then I took up a sport that built on my nascent roller skating skills, having never played a sport of any kind outside phys ed class. I built myself up to a routine that involved cardio and weight lifting in a gym five days a week, roller derby practice three days a week, rink skating two days a week, and trail skating once a week. I was by far in the best shape of my life and working harder than I had ever worked at anything.
I was still nowhere near good at this sport. Before I stopped participating, I was somewhere in the middle of the pack and toward the lower end of the middle. Not the worst skater. Not anywhere near the best. When I stopped playing I gave up on ever getting good at it. I had to acknowledge that I had done something, tried my hardest, and not excelled at it. That’s something I was not used to.
Sometime after I quit, I was having dinner with a friend who had been my fresh meat coach and I told her I felt bad that I’d failed at something I worked hard at. She pointed out:
I learned a skill I didn’t have before (roller skating);
Then learned all the rules and regulations of an unfamiliar sport;
Then learned to play the sport on the track with others;
(And by the way I also learned how to officiate bouts);
Then played the sport in home, away, and exhibition games;
In front of sold-out audiences of folks who paid for the experience of watching me and my army of roller skating girlfriends.
She said, “I don’t know, Bird. That sounds like success to me.” Her assessment was correct. My understanding of success was warped.
That was a breakthrough experience for me in that I learned that I could work hard at something and get okay at it and then stop there, and my best performance of that skill would forever remain “just okay” and I would never improve beyond that.
That’s the story of how I learned to be okay with being okay at something.
The remaining problem, what I’m still dealing with now, is how to recognize that there is a large space between “perfect” and “worthless” and honestly that’s where almost everything lives. There’s nothing that’s perfect; that’s only a concept. Likewise, there’s nothing that’s worthless (except perhaps NFTs). Everything that exists is on a spectrum somewhere between.
Nothing is going to be perfect on the first try. No athletic performance, no dance routine, no draft, no musical composition. Without study and practice, and more practice, and even more practice, and then feedback, iteration, revision, and polish—any creative work will fall short of its potential.
I mean, I’m sure there have been virtuosos you can point to who spit out a masterpiece on the first try, but I maintain that even their work could benefit from being stuffed in a drawer for six weeks and then brought back out for a rousing round of revision.
Anyone who cannot accept that their work falls somewhere between amazing and awful is ill equipped for the grueling work of revision and improvement. Those who can’t accept that they are in the middle ground—or that a middle ground exists at all—either refuse to revise and improve because they believe their work is already perfect; or they will become discouraged and give up because they believe they have failed and cannot improve, that their work has no merit to develop.
Everything a writer creates has value. The value isn’t always in dollars it will bring in if you sell it. Sometimes the value comes in the form of what you learn from writing it. I have an 80,000-word manuscript from which I learned I have the ability to write an 80,000-word manuscript and that’s about all I got from the experience, but it’s still something. You learn from every attempt. Even if you don’t seek feedback, revise, and through that process understand how to do better next time—you still learn from the experience of having done it at all.
This is why people generally produce better art the longer they’ve been at making art. Most of the time, the greatest creative work isn’t the one you make at the very beginning of your artistic career. The Handmaid’s Tale was Margaret Atwood’s sixth novel. Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa in 1504, toward the end of his artistic career. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was his last one.
When I left Maryland to go live in California for a while I left a dumpster fire of a relationship behind. At the time that felt like a failure because my relationship had ended. Later I came to understand that anytime you remove yourself from a situation that makes you unhappy, you succeed. Still later, I had a very positive relationship experience and when that relationship ran its course and ended I recognized it as a success. Not every relationship that ends, fails. Not every relationship that persists, succeeds. In both cases, regardless of the final disposition of the relationship, I had a successful outcome because I learned valuable things from both and also I came out happier on the other side.
All this is to say: If you are a writer and you believe your work is too good to improve, you are wrong. Writing can always improve. If you are a writer and you believe your work is too terrible to improve, you are wrong. Writing can always improve.
Receiving a rejection from an agent or publisher, or a bad review on Amazon or Goodreads, or critical feedback from an editor or beta reader does not mean your work is terrible. (It doesn’t always mean your work needs to improve to be successful, either.) Likewise, receiving a glowing review or selling your manuscript to a publisher or winning an award does not mean your work has reached a pinnacle and can no longer improve.
It’s certainly okay not to want to improve on something. I think our American culture (and especially workplace culture) leans too heavily into the “if you’re not growing you’re dying” mentality. It’s fine to reach an equilibrial state—in any endeavor or skill—where you decide you are happy with your level of success and do not see a need to continue to grow or improve the skill.
This is what I did with roller derby: I reached a point where I said, “this far I have gone and I shall go no further.” That was a good decision for me. There’s no law that says you have to keep on pushing yourself to get better at something forever. It’s okay to be okay at stuff.
I am only saying that if the reason you don’t want to improve is because you have already achieved a state of perfection or that you’re working at a level too poor to improve meaningfully, you are almost certainly wrong.
Simone Biles is excepted from the above; all others this applies to you.
Editor’s Note: For the most authentic experience, read this article in its original Cambria font.
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