Early in my creative life, I was convinced that the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be was a technical one, a skill issue. Everything would be perfect If I could just get the sound right. Get the production to a certain standard. Write with more precision and polish. Sound more like the people I admired; Bowie et al.

So I kept trying to sound professional before I had anything to say. And it nearly killed my output entirely.

The Trap

Here’s what “trying to sound professional” actually looks like in practice: you start a project and immediately start judging it against a finished standard. Every rough note, every awkward sentence, every imperfect first take gets filtered through the question “does this sound like the real thing?”, or “does this sound like x, or the xx or Charlie XCX?” And when the answer is no, which it almost always is early on, you tighten up. You second-guess. You redo. You abandon.

The pressure to perform professionally before you’ve had the chance to play loosely is one of the most effective ways to grind creative output to a halt. Not because the standard is wrong, but because the timing is.

This isn’t just music. Writers do it too: drafting with one eye on how a published author would phrase the same thought. Painters and illustrators comparing their rough studies to finished work. Photographers chasing a polished aesthetic before they’ve worked out what they’re actually drawn to. Filmmakers trying to match production values they admire before they’ve found their eye. The specific discipline doesn’t matter. The pattern is the same.

The Gap (And Why It’s Normal)

Radio producer Ira Glass has one of the most honest things I’ve ever heard anyone say about early creative work. In a now-famous interview, he described what he calls the taste gap: the space between what you can see and what you can make.

When you’re drawn to creative work, it’s usually because you have taste. You know what good looks like. And that taste is exactly what makes your early work so frustrating to you, because you can hear and see the gap clearly.

But the only way to close the gap is volume. More work. Rough work. Work that isn’t trying to be professional yet. Glass’s point was that every creative person he knew who ended up making genuinely interesting work went through years of this phase, and the ones who got through it were the ones who kept going rather than stopping to polish.

The professional sound, or voice, or eye, develops through the accumulation of output. Not through trying to skip the messy middle.

Style Is a Side Effect

There’s a related idea in Austin Kleon’s book Steal Like an Artist. His argument is that style doesn’t come from trying to find your voice: it comes from working, imitating, failing to copy your influences perfectly, and discovering what’s left over when you can’t quite pull it off. Those imperfections, those places where your version diverges from the thing you were trying to make, are where your actual style lives.

Your failed attempts at professional polish are more authentically yours than the polished imitation would ever have been.

I would even say that, art is found in imperfection.

Think about the creative voices you find most distinctive: the writers with a particular rhythm, the musicians with an unmistakable sound, the filmmakers with a visual signature. Almost none of them got there by aiming for it directly. They got there by making a lot of work and finding themselves in the gap between what they were trying to do and what they actually did.

Bonus thought: looseness in early drafts often produces the most interesting ideas. The pressure to be polished cuts off the unexpected detour that might have led somewhere good.

What to Do Instead

The practical shift is simpler than it sounds. Give the early stage of any project permission to be rough. Not forever, but for long enough that the ideas can develop without being filtered through a standard they can’t yet meet.

Judge early work by volume, not quality. The question in the first draft, the first session, the first sketch, is not “is this good?” The question is “did I make something?” The refinement comes later. The polishing comes later. The professional standard can be applied at the editing stage, not the generating stage.

And when you feel the pull to tighten up before you’ve loosened off: that’s the moment to notice. It’s usually fear dressed up as standards.

The most professional thing you can do early on is keep going.Sources:Reuse notes: Early creative work, style development, perfectionism, all creative disciplines

---

Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
namaste
d
xox

If you enjoyed this post please support my writing by making a donation of any amount.

Sign up for my (ir)regular newsletter to keep up to date with my creative adventures, including special offers, and join me on Instagram | YouTube | Twitter | Pinterest