I can’t
recommend highly enough this tribute that Louis C.K. gave to the late, great
George Carlin, which basically describes the moment you realize that you’re nowhere near good enough to make it, but it’s too late to go back: “I’d been doing this fifteen years but nobody
gave a shit who I was and I didn’t either. But what could I do?
After fifteen years, it would be like getting out of prison! How could
you re-enter the workforce?”
The solution
that he heard from Carlin turned his career around: Use up all of your “best”
material as fast as you can and never think about it again. Take all those ideas that
you’re cherishing and holding tight to your breast, the ones that might make you
big someday, and just use them all up. Write them and send them out and forget about them.
Whenever I
find myself saying “I can’t write that one yet, I’m not good enough,” I always
try to remind myself that, If I’m not good enough, then my ideas probably
aren’t good enough either, so it’s the always the perfect time to write
whatever ideas I have. And even
if I do find that I’m tackling something overly ambitious, that’s great,
because it will force me to get better quickly.
The worst
thing you can do is to slowly polish some idea for years and years, convinced that
it will one day make you rich.
That will keep you looking backwards, not forward...and it will ruin
the idea. You don’t want to add any polish to your ideas, you want to do just the opposite: strip them down to their essence. The more polish you apply, the more you’ll
have to scrape off later.
Precious material is death. The only way to get better is to generate new material, and the only way to do that is to find out
what’s buried underneath every old idea that you’re still hoarding. What you’ll find is raw,
uncomfortable, specific, personal, honest material.