creativity


Progress, not Perfection

“Just start.”

That advice is supposed to be freeing. For some people, it’s enough to get them moving. For me, it does the opposite. It kicks off a mental cascade: every step, every dependency, every unknown lined up at once. The thing I want to make begins editing itself in my head—quietly, relentlessly—into something perfect.

And that version rarely exists in reality. It almost never matches my actual skill set at that moment in time.

The problem, of course, is that creativity doesn’t work that way. It’s a practice. Ira Glass talks about this in The Gap: early on, your taste is good. You know what “great” looks like, but your ability hasn’t caught up yet. The only way to close that distance is to keep making things anyway. To produce work you already know falls short.

Intellectually, I understand that. Practically, I still resist it.

This blog is proof. It’s been sitting dormant for years, not because I didn’t have ideas, but because I kept trying to start it correctly. I wanted the right cadence, the right voice, the right framing. I wanted a version of the blog that felt fully formed before it existed at all.

Recently, while browsing swissmiss, I came across this TED talk:

It landed harder than I expected. Not because it said something new, but because it said something I was clearly ready to hear. That starting imperfectly isn’t a failure of discipline or ambition, it’s the only viable entry point.

I’m not much for New Year’s resolutions, but I can say this plainly: I didn’t create enough in 2025. I spent too much time refining ideas in my head and not enough time putting things into the world where they could be shaped by friction, feedback, and time.

So this is me starting this blog. Not as a declaration, and not as a promise. There’s no posting schedule. No commitment to consistency. Just movement.

Progress, not perfection.

Let's see where the adventure takes me.

creativity