The importance of doing a bad job
The importance of doing a bad job
When you can’t seem to get started, make the process the goal. Featuring a peek into my writing method
One of the hardest things about becoming a musician is getting started. Let’s be honest: almost no one likes being a beginner. Why? Because beginners make a lot of mistakes. Beginners don’t get to enjoy impressive results. Being a beginner is embarrassing. It’s especially embarrassing if you’re at all perfectionistic. Due to dread of the beginner experience, many people who love music and would love to learn to play or sing - especially adults! - can never bring themselves to start lessons at all, or they quit early on. If that’s you, I hope what I’m about to say here will help you bite that bullet and start making music.
Being a perfectionist can be immobilizing. Those really high standards you have for your finished work translate into intense aversion to doing poor quality work or making mistakes. Being a beginner is all about poor quality work and mistakes, though, and being a beginner is a necessary first step to being competent and creating high quality work. But when you’re afraid to make mistakes, you can’t get started on anything. You experience what I call the perfectionist freeze.
Back in my school days, I used to do a lot of writing assignments. I generally did them very well, but they took much longer than they should have, because I had trouble with the idea of making a draft. I always wanted the finished work to spring fully formed from my forehead. As a result, I used to spend ages staring at a blank page, trying to begin writing an essay or report. I wasted hours like this every time I had a writing assignment, frozen with indecision over how to start. I wanted every sentence to be right the first time. I realized this was an unrealistic expectation, but knowing that didn’t help me know what to do instead.
The solution I discovered was to move the goalposts: I started trying to do a bad job.
The revolution began for me when I first learned to use Ye Olde Five-Paragraph Essay Format. Once I discovered this classic (and somewhat hated by English teachers, apparently) writing template, I was able to crank out short essays in approximately the time it takes to type them. I had it down to a sentence-by-sentence formula, which I used to absolutely slay every essay test question I encountered, except the ones about information I didn’t know. My problem wasn’t coming up with ideas, it was organizing them, and having a formula solved that problem for me.
YOFPEF doesn’t suit every writing need, though. The way you organize your ideas depends on what your ideas are. The method I later developed, and still use, is what I call the Placeholder Method. You use placeholders to represent your content, organize the flow of information, then fill in the actual writing. Here’s the step-by-step guide:
Laurel’s Placeholder Method for Nonfiction Writing
Brainstorm content - Come up with a topic, or ask yourself a question. Then, spend some time reading, thinking, and having conversations, until you know what you want to say about that topic. You can write yourself notes, or keep it all in your head.
Itemize content - On a blank page, carelessly write out any idea, point, or broad section that you want to include. Summarize ideas, and avoid complete sentences as much as possible. You can add, combine, or delete items later in the process, so don’t censor yourself, don’t overthink trying to make an exhaustive list, and don’t explain in detail. These are just placeholders for what you’ll eventually write. What you’ve created at this point should look terrible. If it’s a sloppy hodgepodge of phrases, you’ve done it well.
Arrange items - Cut and paste your bits into some semblance of a logical order, grouping ideas together into sections. Now you’ve created a really bad version of your finished work - I mean, a proper outline of what you intend to write. This is one point at which you might realize that certain parts are unneeded or should be combined with another part, or that you want to add something to connect or embellish your existing information. If you don’t have enough content to make a coherent point, go back to step 1 to fill in the gaps. Below is an example of how my outline for this article looked at this stage.
Write complete sentences - Start turning your notes into complete sentences and paragraphs. You don’t have to go in order. You don’t have to complete the part you’re working on before moving on to something else. Pick at your outline here and there, fleshing out and fixing up ideas bit by bit, until you’ve got a whole draft.
Edit and rearrange - Once everything is written, read over it and see if it flows properly. Improve any clunky or unclear wording. You can adjust the order of sentences or sections and/or add transitional sentences between sections. You may even want to add more content that wasn’t represented in your outline at stage 3.
Proofread - Give it a once over for spelling, punctuation, and overall quality. This is the stage at which I ask someone else (typically my sister Lydia) to read it and point out any weird stuff. Why obsess over whether you’ve made yourself sufficiently clear to your reader, when you could just ask a reader if it’s sufficiently clear? It takes the guesswork, and a lot of time and effort, out of the process.
Image text: Draft: Doing a bad job/how to get started
Intro: perfectionism makes it hard to start things, having high standards, blah blah
Personal example
My solution is to do a bad job on purpose
Why it’s a good solution - you don’t have to change your perfectionistic attitude if you see making mistakes as your goal. Hard to create a perfect thing from thin air, easier to fix up something that already exists. Concrete steps as opposed to end goal with no path to get there
Describe outline method: brainstorm content, itemize content, arrange items, realize each item as a paragraph, edit/rearrange, proofread. insert rough draft as example - text or screenshot? Does this go here? Where does this go?
Your eventual goal should be to embrace making mistakes. Why mistakes are good. Something something growth mindset. This method is a stepping stone to that goal - practicing making mistakes rewires you to be able to make and handle mistakes in more organically occurring circumstances.
How this relates to music study: making the process the goal; maybe link to some articles about practicing
Introduce “progress for perfectionists” series, point out category link at top, mailing list, solicit suggestions and comments
Try this method for yourself - and if you do, comment or message me to let me know how it worked for you. You don’t have to strictly follow the steps. The main point is to intentionally create a bad version of your idea, perhaps even a comically bad version, if that makes you more comfortable with creating something bad. From there, you can transform it into a higher-quality finished piece.
The reason this method works to overcome the perfectionist freeze is that it’s a process with manageable steps. The problem I had, staring helplessly at my blank page, is that my intention was, “Write an excellent paper.” That is not a very actionable goal unless you create specific steps to achieve it. I recently read about an interesting study on how good and not-so-good basketball players practice differently. TL;DR - the better players identified specific reasons for their failures and used them to form specific goals for their practice attempts, and the worse players did not. To achieve excellence efficiently, you need to itemize your process.
Making a rough outline of my content allowed me to see what individual steps I had to take to complete the paper. It’s easier to see how to fix something rough than to conjure something perfect out of thin air. The fact that much of the work can be completed in no particular order kept me from getting stuck on a sentence I couldn’t smooth out or an idea I couldn’t think how to articulate.
This method doesn’t do much to address the root causes of perfectionism, and that’s part of its beauty.
It’s hard to truly change your mentality towards imperfection. You can’t be okay with mistakes and shortcomings in an instant, just by deciding you will. We all know that mistakes are an opportunity for learning and all that, but... we feel how we feel. Doing a bad job on purpose meant I didn’t have to let go of my aversion to doing it wrong, because when doing it wrong is the point, you’re actually doing it right! You don’t have to change your perfectionistic attitude if you see making mistakes as your objective.
Eventually, you want to be able to embrace making mistakes as a necessary, beneficial, normal part of the learning process. The placeholder method is a stepping stone to that goal - practicing intentionally being imperfect in a controlled manner helps prime you to be able to make and handle mistakes in more organically occurring circumstances.
What circumstances? Well, learning music comes to mind! Many beginning music students who have a perfectionistic mindset really struggle to figure out how to practice well. There can be a lot of frustration and distress when your only goal is, “Play this music perfectly.” Practice is just hours and hours of wrongness, if that’s how you look at it, and no one can or should tolerate continually feeling like they’re failing. You need to identify a practice process and consider it a success every time you engage in that process. This will go a long way toward alleviating your anxiety about imperfection. Practicing music isn’t as straightforward as plugging information into a writing template, but you can still create practice procedures that break down what you’re learning into small, specific, achievable goals. For more on how to do that, read my deep-dive into what good practice looks and feels like here.
This article is the first in a series addressing the challenges of perfectionists, both in music study and in life. There’s a “Progress for Perfectionists” category tag above the post title, which you can click to see everything in the series so far. Add your email address to the mailing list if you want to make sure to read future installments.
As a (mostly) recovered perfectionist myself, I feel for the students and friends in my life whose perfectionism gets in their way, and I’ve put a lot of deep consideration into how to address the struggles we all face in trying to live up to our potential and keep our sanity at the same time.
Please leave a comment or send me a message if you want to share your own experience, or if you want to suggest a topic for a future article. I would love to hear from you.
