Five paragraph essay (is it useful?)
I’ve been heads-down on a bigger project that is just beginning. There are good bones to it, but it needs work, the kind of work where other people poke at it and find all of the holes, and I hate that kind of work because it means that I have to show unfinished work to people and hope that they are gentle-but-not.
Gentle-but-not means respecting the idea behind the work but not ripping it to shreds, not interventioning me and whispering hey nickd, maybe this is a career-tanking atrocity of an idea in a quiet part of the house party. Gentle-but-not means they are willing to get excited about the idea, willing to find the ways to make it better. Which means they have to be on board with the mission of the thing.
And I have no idea how to find those people. I have no idea whether the work itself is worthy of that level of engagement in people. When I made my first book, it was quite easy to find lots of people because design was very much a thing. This work is perhaps of an idea that people tend to shy away from, which makes the “addressable market” for it kind of slippery & challenging. I’m not really making this for impact, fortunately, but I still want it to be good, and I sense that my last book was a bit of a brick, either shipped to an industry that could care less about the ideas in it or just of a lower quality than I tend to put out.
You only get so many big shots, you know? You have a certain number of years to live, and a big project takes years by definition, so you need to make it good and focus obsessively on quality, how it’s received, whether you’re doing something that is genuinely useful. Every creative person in the world has been struck with the doubt that what they are doing is, in fact, not good. And they need to put the thing out and be confident about it anyway.
So in short, I made something, but it’s not “done” in either the is-refined-enough-to-show-off sense or the is-existentially-worthy-of-the-human-experiment sense, but it’s there, on my hard drive, taking up space, and I know that if I put more time & attention into it, it’ll become something that is maybe worthy of both.