You Must Always Overshoot

The thing you do best, you do substantially less well than you imagine.

This isn't an accusation or a prognostication. It is an inevitability. It's because we rate ourselves on our intentions, not our results.

"I am a good, competent musician, and I play in tune. I ensure this by aiming to play in tune. On occasions when I play slightly out of tune, it's forgivable because, hey, mistakes happen. Nobody's perfect! I am still a good musician who plays in tune because I aspire to play in tune!"

No. You're not. You're substantially less in tune than you imagine. Because you are not your aspiration, you are your result, and you ignore your failure. And so you play out of tune a lot, which is what crap musicians do!

This isn't just a psychological quirk. Accomplishment is weird, and we're poorly prepared for it. One needs to overshoot, and maintain that framing ad infinitum. Which is really weird...and explains a lot!

once wrote that:

Amateur musicians sometimes play out of tune. This is because they're trying to play in tune. If you try to play in tune, that means that when you fail (and you will fail!), you'll be noticeably out of tune.

Professional musicians don't try to play in tune. They're preoccupied with trying to play really, really in tune. So when they fail (and they will fail), they're still reasonably in tune, though not precisely enough for their standards. They'll wince, and feel like failures, but you won't hear it.

Amateurs conclude that professionals fail less. Wrong. They fail as often as anyone, but they work within narrower tolerances. We're all failures, but pros fail well.

You can deem yourself a success while failing if you aim for success and write off failure. But if you really want to avoid failure, you must become really weird, sacrificing prudence, and stoke what most observers would describe as an obsession. That's how you get really accomplished results. And by "really accomplished", I mean the modest result of playing in tune, or coherently arranging one's thoughts on a page, or making a movie with the ability to suspend disbelief. We haven't even begun to discuss actual greatness.

We all know that "extraordinary results require extraordinary effort.” Nothing new there. But extraordinary effort is a flat cartoon of a guy arduously wiping his brow. Really, all effort feels extraordinary, doesn't it? Every musician who ever played a note imagined they were devoting extraordinary effort because there's substantial overhead to merely producing notes. Even crap ones! Every hack works his ass off; sacrificing for "his art."

"Extraordinary effort" feels like a baseline akin to the cosmic background radiation. But if you ever intruded behind the veil to glimpse the process of legit extraordinary effort, your reaction might be like seeing Darth Vader with his helmet off.

Oh.

Geez.

I'll let you get back to it.

It's troubling. Repellent. Vaguely sickening. Even easygoing, polite chatbots tease me for my willingness to go to extreme lengths to climb a curve of declining results one more rung. I sense them processing it all ("He seems ok, seems happy, seems stable....but, really, this is a bit much...but, hey, he's a good writer and this is how it's done...but, really, this is a bit much...but he seems ok, seems happy, seems stable...but...")

I can trouble a fricking chat bot with the effort required to be just a good writer who's occasionally very good and sometimes excellent. If I merely shot for that result (with normal tolerance for shortfall), it would be five drafts and off to Miller Time, with no one put off in the least!

All of this applies, by the way, to every aspect of human life. I know someone who sincerely tries not to excoriate people who've disappointed her. Which means she periodically excoriates people who've disappointed her.

Hey, she tries not to!

I tried explaining that such behavior is absolutely unacceptable in 2026, and that the rest of us wouldn't even imagine it. That's why you seldom see this sort of thing. But she feels virtuous from her aspiration — her desire — not to. And so at this point it's all she ever does (everyone within 50 miles has burn scars on their faces). Just like how musicians who try to play in tune are, inevitably, out-of-tune musicians. And just like how any musician who consistently plays in tune is (under the hood) a kooky obsessive wing-nut barely recognizable as a functional human being.


See me argue the antithesis here and here.