Unlocking Creativity through Iterative Improvement

In a great talk from last year’s Ruby Remote Conf, Peter Cooper gave me permission to write scrappy code (Seriously, he did. We can go back and listen to it together if you like.)

This was a great thing he told me, and it is especially helpful as he is far from the only person I’ve recently heard extolling the benefits of cobbling something together that works, and only then making it pretty and extensible. You know, maybe.

When you hear someone tell you to just enjoy yourself, get it done, and worry about the niceties later, I think a destructively perfectionistic person has at least three concerns:

1. Other people are going to see my project and find it wanting
2. I won’t be able to refrain from vicious self-judgment
3. Once the project is done there’ll be no incentive for me to come back later and make it better

So other people might make judgments about your worth as a programmer or a person based on your code. So what? It seems very appropriate to say that people who make those kinds of judgments about you based on one program are not the kind of people you’d be wise to cultivate a relationship with in the first place. I mean, not to tell you your business or anything.

Self-critique is a tough one. There’s a multiplicity of methods for overcoming it, but many can be a bit nebulous and complex to unpack. Furthermore, you can actually spend hours, days, or weeks talking to someone about how to be nicer to themselves and see (or rather infer) only trivial changes in their mental landscape — changes which might be erased in very short order. This is because the mind can only be changed through the consistent and wise application of method — intellectual knowledge by itself is totally inadequate. One common and fruitful place to begin, however, is in contemplating the drawbacks of self-critique and the benefits of self-acceptance (if you have too much resistance to that, you might try the drawbacks of abundant self-critique and the benefits of self-acceptance based on your work. You can always iterate later.)

So once the project is done and working, you’ll never look back, you say? Couple things. First of all, if you have this problem of being excessively self-critical, having something sloppy out there that you created — perhaps even with your name on it — is going to make you very uncomfortable. Second of all, if you let your project go and open it up to feedback, you’re bound to get back some useful avenues of inquiry that you can get excited about it. And finally, never underestimate the comboing power of a string of successes — you are much more likely to want to come back and work on a project and do good work if you have positive feelings about it.

And even if you bloodied your nose on the grindstone, I’d bet you a fair sum that it’s still not perfect.