NOT SLOPPY IS BETTER THAN SLOPPY

lots of the time

I’ve been in this funk recently where I think of Substack ideas or long term projects I want to work on, work on them for maybe 1-2 hours, and ditch them because they’re not in a shippable state, and I don’t have the motivation or the time to give them the care they deserve. Previously, I would’ve just published them anyways, but I’ve started to discover downsides of my “DONE IS BETTER THAN PERFECT” philosophy. Done is better than perfect means that you optimize for getting shit done, even if that means taking shortcuts and lowering your quality bar. This is great for moving past paralysis, but it can also beget sloppiness.

Sometimes sloppiness is insufficient, hence the title NOT SLOPPY IS BETTER THAN SLOPPY. At work, it’d be unacceptable if I turned in unpolished work with typos and incomplete ideas. As much as that annoys my inner messy self, I also know that I want to be associated with being put together and having clear ideas. A similar idea holds outside of work: I no longer want to publish sloppy, rambling pieces. I know I can write cogent, engaging pieces, and I’d like to hold myself to that standard. I want to be a woman of quality.

I’ve come to realize that often quality takes quantity, which takes time and effort and care. Min Jin Lee once compared good writing to making cheese—it takes about ten pounds of milk to make one pound of cheddar. So for a good 5000 word essay, you’ll inevitably need to have written 50,000 words across the drafting process. Sometimes I capture lightning in a bottle and get lucky enough to publish something after two sittings, but I also have projects I’ve nearly abandoned because I’ve lost all hope after five pounds of milk. I owe it to myself to at least keep trying until I reach ten pounds — how can I produce quality if I systematically get cockblocked by myself halfway through?

I often get frustrated when I have to spend more than an hour on a task. That’s why I’ve never made bread or cooked some of my favorite foods. Sometimes I can circumvent this by cooking entirely different foods instead — air fried steak, ricotta puddings that come together in less than three minutes — but sometimes you just want to eat fucking delicious homemade bread. What do you do then?

Certain beautiful things require active effort. You can’t circumvent raising kids well or having a good diet and expect to get the same result. There’s some snarky part of me that keeps thinking to myself, well fuck that! I’ll automate parenting and outsmart my body, but there’s a larger part of me that recognizes sometimes, you just have to put in the hours.

as you can tell i am cheese deprived