Why Bad Work is Necessary

You have to make bad stuff before you can make good stuff.

Everyone who has ever made anything (written, designed, built, recorded, filmed, whatever) went through a period where what they were making was genuinely not good.

Not just a little rough around the edges or “almost there.” Bad. Like stinking, awful bad.

That period of being bad wasn't a little detour from the path of progression… it was the path.

I learned how to use Photoshop — and learned graphic design in general — by making a whole bunch complete garbage.

My process was simple: I’d see something I liked on the Internet and then I’d figure out how to make it myself.

For the first hundred things I made, the result was almost always like a Temu version of what I liked… truly dire stuff.

But every now and then, something good would happen. Something would click and I’d make a design or a poster or whatever that ended up looking decent.

At some point, without noticing exactly when, the bad work became less bad, and then it became okay, then, eventually, something I thought was pretty good.

That's how it works. I’m not kidding, that’s how improvement works.

Nobody is born knowing the right amount of margins to use on a magazine spread or how to play the piano like Beethoven or how to act as well as Bryan Cranston. There's no version of the story where the good stuff arrives first, where you smash out a killer logo on your first go with Illustrator.

Doesn’t happen. Lord knows life would be easier if it did happen like that, but it don’t.

The Bit People Skip

The problem isn't that people don't know this; they do. Everyone nods along in agreement when you say it.

The problem is that knowing you need a bad phase, and actually living through it, are completely different things.

When you're in it, when the thing you're making looks nothing like what you imagined, it's easy to read that as a sign that you're not not destined to improve. It’s a whole other thing to understand that you need to be bad before you get good.

Knowing that your ability and your goal isn’t aligned doesn’t mean you should give up; it means you're a beginner, and every expert was once a beginner too.

Think of it like this: the bad stuff is the tuition.

The only way out of it is through it, and the only way through it is to keep making things, even when they're bad… right up until they're not.

In a world where people are selling a million different hacks to “get good quick,” embracing the essential path to progression is the most authentic (and beneficial) thing you can do.