This morning I made a commitment to wiring my ‘enemy’ ten thousand dollars if I did not publish three blog posts by the end of the day.
It is no surprise to me - or to anyone else who knows me - that the money in question will not be leaving my bank account (at least not until it’s time to pay my taxes). There was never a world where I’d be wiring this person ten thousand dollars come midnight because there was never a world where I didn’t complete three pieces of writing today.
It is, in fact, quite easy to publish three pieces of subpar work. And of course, I knew this all along.
I knew the bar I was setting for myself was too high and that the panic would likely dysregulate me come midday (it did). I knew the setup for the occasion was not conducive to deep, thought-provoking work and what I published would likely be unsatisfying (it was). I knew there were a plethora of other experiments I could design for myself (and use my enthusiastic friend group to join me in) that could elicit decent, interesting work and yet this is the one I picked anyway: the one that would almost necessarily produce crap.
One has to wonder about my subconscious motivations here.
And so I will be using this post to explore them.
There seems to be some part of me that was wanting to produce bad work today. A part of me that in fact thought bad work was so important to produce that it rented out an entire boardroom and gathered a whole group of people to join me on the mission.
This is arguably my long-standing failure mode: I jump quickly and impulsively into action. I don’t always think about the ‘why.’
And yet, I almost never regret this staying-in-motion. This knee-jerk part of me that acts up most strongly when depression begins rearing its head and threatening to eat my mind whole. What if I just took some silly action, in some random direction, and stayed on board to see through what happened next?
This outlook has led me down some unsavory paths in the past. But I believe it has also saved me from the far worse fate of wasting my life.
We tend to think of bad or subpar work in relation to the greater work that we imagine we are capable of. This is what paralyzes us with self-doubt and keeps us petrified of being seen. But this is the wrong way to look at things, mostly. The better thing to compare subpar work to is no work at all.
Is there a single seed absolutely anywhere, in anything we’re doing, that might be sown? Is there a friction our action is creating that might end up driving us even-slightly forward? Is there a signal of hope we’re accidentally emitting that might get picked up by anybody else around us, who might use it to fuel their own growth?
If so, is it not worth it to move in that direction?
Is it not better than sitting around at home, plugging away on some less inspiring task and wondering what we’ll one day create?
Perhaps the part of myself that forced this day into existence knew - in a place I could not consciously access - that I would never throw myself into motion if I were waiting for the conditions to be perfect. And so I had to force my own hand into producing imperfection. To feel the pain and humiliation of publishing pieces long before they felt ready, and learning that those feelings would not kill me.
But the alternative of inertia might.
As we brought our boardroom of silly and ambitious people to a close this afternoon, a friend of mine remarked that she felt humbled by the task she’d taken on. This word resonated for me deeply.
When I ask myself the question ‘who do I think I am to commit myself to subpar work,’ the reflexive answer that arrives to me is: who do I think I am not to?
If my options are to do bad work or do to nothing, I suppose I will keep doing bad work. Keep offering whatever I’ve got. Keep myself wheeling, in motion, in hopes of learning or of picking up something meaningful en route.
The battle is not between good work and bad work, most days. It’s between bad work and wasting our potential.
And so we put pen to paper. Or whatever it is that we do. We humble ourselves enough to do it badly, every now and then, in service of the greater work we’re capable of.
We do not wire our enemies $10,000. We just think about the next iteration.
And we try it. Then we try it again.