If It's Worth Doing, It's Worth Doing Poorly

It feels appropriate that in sitting down to write this I intended to reference something I read recently and realized I had forgotten to bookmark it. I have been trying to be better about keeping a "second brain" with Pinboard and Obsidian but I still forget to bookmark things, forget to write things down, lose them somewhere in the sea of tabs and browsers and devices that are a part of my daily life. I have always aspired for this site to be something like Simon Willison's blog - a constantly updated, eternally useful source of knowledge - but mostly it's a haphazardly thrown-together log of a haphazardly thrown-together life. Poorly done but worth it nonetheless.

In the way our pattern-seeking brains tend to create, the phrase "if it's worth doing, it's worth doing poorly" has been popping up a lot for me lately. The phrase itself is a misquote of G.K. Chesterton (the original is “If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing badly.”). I am, by the objective measures I set out for myself early on in my hundred days of writing, doing a pretty poor job of it. Today marks five days without an update. This is blog post #74, but at the pace I'm going right now I'll be lucky if I finish before the end of the summer.

I have always struggled with perfectionism. I have an innate tendency to procrastinate or give up on things out of the fear that they won't be good enough. In response to that fear, I end up creating strict rules for myself to prevent myself from giving up (like, say, do something every day for a hundred days) that end up being another thing I'm afraid of failing at. Basically I tend to keep building on top of the same house of cards intended to avoid failure until at some point it collapses under its own weight.

I wish I'd done it before age 33 but I've been coming to terms with the fact that I am too hard on myself. Not that I haven't been intellectually aware of it for a long time but between forcing myself to undercommit and losing my mom I have come to actually believe it and think that it is something I have to address. Part of that is being fine with doing things at my own pace and being okay with not everything I do being the best it can be. As much as I'd like for there to be One Simple Trick to wake up tomorrow and be exactly the person I always wanted to be this is a process that involves a lot of little steps and will probably last the rest of my life. Holding myself as I am now to the standard of the person I am in my most deeply held dreams tends to have the opposite effect from what I'd like it to be.

So I will continue to do things poorly. Do things because I want to do them and accept that I won't always do them as well or consistently as I'd like. If I can get up and keep taking those steps, accept the days I don't succeed without letting them pile up forever, then I'll end up somewhere good.

I'm still going to try to finish this hundred days but I'm going to be okay with however long it takes. As much as I have criticized people doing these things in a "gentle" way in the past I am coming to realize they were probably right. I think the writing will end up being better for giving myself the extra time. So I apologize to the past version of me that thought missing days was failure. I hope he'd forgive me but the more important thing is that I'm forgiving myself.