Reply To: How does one “create” something?

[Grant]

@spikeyxxx 

You’ve got me pegged, I’m a perfectionist at heart. I’ve been trying to work on relaxing that over the years. It’s one of those nasty habits that I’m trying to reevalulate.

You are right, I am afraid of failure. It’s something that is very difficult to work around. A lot of the stuff I’ve made in the past is openly on display, but actual productive feedback for it is very sparse(i.e., the internet). In that kind of environment, you end up coaching yourself into this corner where you need everything to be impeccable upon release, despite the fact that there is literally nothing at stake the VAST majority of the time.

On that note, one realization I had the day after I posted this topic was that I used to base a lot of what I made on what other people deemed valuable. Money and noteriety drive a lot of things, but at a certain point they become intoxicating. Essentially, many of my projects(which were entirely for fun, in my free time), would be driven by the expectation they would need to perform as a product or service, despite the fact that I don’t actually need any of them to turn a profit. It’s a bizarre scenario, in hindsight. It’s my hobby, yet I allowed other people to corrupt it by assigning it arbitrary value.

That false reality would creep in on every project. I’d quit projects constantly because “I” felt like they were a waste of time. What I’m finding out is that it’s not my opinion driving that sentiment, it’s other peoples’.

I don’t know if the issue I’ve described is common, but I can certainly say that, in the time I’ve spent trying to make things “valuable”, all I ever did was waste time. I never really completed anything that could be sold, so that mindset turned out to be entirely self-defeating.

Also, don’t worry about being “wrong” or “right”, I’m polling people for their experience to help me reevaluate mine. You read what I had to say and responded with helpful advice. You added something valuable to the conversation. If there is a chance that it sparks something in me, or perhaps even some random viewer that stumbles upon this later, then voicing it is all the more worth it.