The Dead Ends of Shitty Mozart

Artists, even great ones - especially great ones! - abandon work constantly. It took me a very long time to shake the shame of unfinished projects and realize that dead-ends are an essential part of the process.

It's only a problem if literally nothing ever emerges. If so, you have one of two problems:

1. You suck

So commit a quintillion times harder! As I explained in my essay "Should You Go to Cooking School?",

"However good you are now, get way way better, and then, when you're certain you're good enough, get way way better still. And then get better. Finally, realize you absolutely suck and triple it. Don't wait for an authority figure to goad you into improvement. Make it happen as a matter of survival.

Not that this requires further clarification, but don’t stop improving when people around you start telling you you’re awesome. That happens at the beginning of this cycle. When friends and family start gasping in admiration, that means you’re like one single notch above completely sucking."

Or...

2. You don't recognize when your stuff is good

So work to develop more detached self-evaluation; come back later with a fresh eye; find a trusted sounding board; and/or learn to distinguish between a sloppy nth draft of a good idea and a crap idea.

The slop/crap distinction is huge for me. Everything I do starts embarrassingly bad (watch me write). As I bash and bash and bash to iterate my way out of my intrinsic shittiness, things eventually clarify. Either there's no "there" there (so I need to fix the thinking rather than the execution), or else I'm on to something that requires a trillion more cycles of improvement.

There was one human being whose every creative gesture was solid gold, and who never discarded anything (he never erased a note, from what I've heard): Wolfgang Mozart.

Don't expect to be Mozart! Settle for becoming Shitty Mozart. Shitty Mozart fakes being Mozart by keeping his non-Mozartian output well out of view (expect a ton of it!), and working his ass off to arduously produce an occasional fleeting semblance of what Mozart effortlessly dashed off.

You need two contradictory faculties: 1. The humility to recognize that you're not Mozart (so don't sweat the size of your reject pile), and 2. The conceitedness to try to fool people into thinking you're Mozart (by hiding your copious failure).

Actually being Mozart, alas, is not an option. So if any of this depresses you - if your dead-ends leave you feeling less than optimally productive - your first task is to accept that unavoidable fact, and then move forward to becoming a Shitty Mozart.