There’s nothing like consuming something perfect, a book without a word out of place, an entrancing song, or an article you wish didn’t end.
For me, that’s Kendrick Lamar’s album DAMN.
I could crank that lyrical genius start to finish, on repeat, preferably with noise-canceling headphones. It’s flawless.
That’s how a finished product should be, whatever your craft.
Your work should shock the viewer by making it look easy.
A final product doesn’t show the process of trial and error. A published song doesn’t show hours of word selection, or long nights alone in the studio reworking beats when you’d rather be elsewhere.
That’s why you shouldn’t record the routines of professional stand-up comedians.
They bring their best and worst content to the stage to receive public feedback. The funniest jokes have been crafted and tweaked over years of laughs and jeers, so posting a test version to the internet cheats the viewer, who may not buy a ticket to hear the routine’s final form.
Numbers and feedback don’t lie when judging your work, especially from strangers who have no problem roasting you on the internet’s stage.
But that’s how you learn and grow.
The grueling day-to-day grind tones your work like a 75-year-old bodybuilder after a lifetime of focus.
A professional gains mastery by showing up every day, inspired or not. You make true gains when working overtime and when exhausted.
A personal trainer taught me the importance of training to failure– that is, adding weight and reps until you physically fail.
Lifting weights causes micro-tears in muscles, which the body repairs to be better and stronger through hypertrophy to handle that weight and more next time.
Professional work is no different. You make the greatest gains when you feel like you can work no longer, and then you get a news dump at 5:08 p.m. on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend.
It’s painful at the time, and you can’t see the growth until later.
So I’m going to write more articles, blog posts, and maybe more to create my version of DAMN.