*Typing*
You have no idea what you're missing.
Revise. Revise. Revise.
Hemingway rewrote the end of ‘A Farewell to Arms’ 47 times. Van Gogh painted ‘Starry Night’ 21 times. Michael Jackson recorded ‘Billie Jean’ 91 times. Take your time. It’s often the extra time taken that makes something extraordinary.
Easy/ Hard
Doing the easy thing makes you easy to compete with.
Doing the hard thing makes you hard to compete with.
Think big but start small.
By starting small, you give your skills the time to catch up with your thinking. Netflix started out renting DVDs. Nike started out building track shoes for runners at University of Oregon. Amazon started out shipping books. Shopify started out selling snowboards online. Toyota started out manufacturing industrial-sized looms. Instagram started out making pretty photo filters. Lululemon started out designing yoga pants. eBay started out auctioning Beanie Babies.
Give it time.
Time is the only true judge of beautiful work. Most of the work you see receiving attention today will be forgotten tomorrow. This reality creates an eternal struggle that plagues the creator throughout her career. When ugly, plastic work gets rewarded in the short-term, the choice to make something of substance becomes all the more difficult. In these moments of temptation, it’s worth remembering: Beautiful work endures. Ugly work does not. The choice is yours.