Why Lowering Your Standards Might Actually Make You Better.

I spend a fair amount of time on YouTube, just scrolling around, watching random things, going down rabbit holes, and I'll catch myself thinking, can't I do better? Shouldn't I be reading some classic literature or making a great painting? I don't know, maybe, but maybe not. I plan to read more literary novels, but sometimes I end up blowing through some cheesy thriller that I grab at the library, and my wife buys kale to make us healthy salads, and then we find ourselves eating frozen pizza on the couch. I add Kurosawa and Bergman films to my list of movies I've got to watch next, but then I also rewatch the same episode of Seinfeld for the fifth time, because it makes me laugh, and I already know how it ends. I like to think that I have standards. I know what good is, or at least I have some idea, but I'm cool with lowering those standards dramatically. If I only ever let myself do things that are objectively great, I'd miss out on a lot of joy. And more to the point, I'd probably do very little at all. I own this stack of soft cotton t-shirts, and they all say, Create Every Day, across the front. And they're from this project that I did with Kit. That's the platform that I use to send out my weekly newsletter emails. And I didn't ask to be a walking billboard, but they sent me a bunch of these t-shirts, and they're comfortable, and it's easy to grab one when I'm getting dressed first thing in the morning in the dark. Maybe you've seen me wearing them occasionally in videos, but I don't wear them because I'm making some kind of a statement. I don't know, maybe in a way I guess I am, because I do create every day. Not because I swore a vow, or made a vision board, or read a t-shirt, but because that's just what I do, even if it's not great. Especially if it's not great. And I've been doing this for a long time now, making things. Videos, drawings, essays, books. Some of my ideas, some of my essays, they were strong. I felt it in my gut when I made them. And people make comments, tell me that they felt they were good too. But plenty of them just fell flat. And some of them I regret publishing, some of them I barely remember writing. The same is true with my YouTube videos. A few of them have taken off, millions of views, thousands of comments, ooh, viral. But others have just quietly disappeared. And I'm a terrible judge of which will be which. Anybody watch this video? And I used to hesitate, I would sit on my ideas, I would wait until I was sure, sure as I could be, that they were good enough, good enough to share. And if years ago I had imagined that one day tens of thousands of strangers, or in the case of YouTube, hundreds of thousands of strangers would be watching or reading what I tapped out on my phone each week, I probably would have just gone back to bed. But at some point I realized, if I keep waiting for everything to be brilliant, I'm never going to make anything at all. I gave myself a kind of permission to be mediocre, to miss the mark, to write something that nobody else likes, or to draw something that just kind of doesn't work, or to say something dumb, or to skip shaving, or to make a thing and to just move on. And some of my best work has come from that laxness, letting go of trying to be impressive, from not knowing if it was good and just sharing it anyway. And sometimes the stuff that I thought was brilliant just lands with a thud. The stuff that I almost didn't share, that's what got the strongest response. I'm not a great judge of my own work. I used to think that my worth came from only making great things, but I've slowly come to believe that my worth comes from just making things. The judgment comes later, if it comes at all. The truth is, we don't get judged by our worst work, we get remembered for our best. And even that judgment, it's mostly in our heads. I'm not even sure who's keeping score. And besides, don't they have anything better to do? So I've made peace with the fact that some days I'll write like Joan Didion, and some days I'll write like a guy who just finished a frozen pizza in a t-shirt that says, Create Every Day. There are a lot of essayists who are better than I am. David Sedaris, or E.B. White, or Robert Benchley, or Russell Baker. And yet, here I am. Good enough. I hope you found this helpful. And if you did, sign up for my free essays. I'll send you great advice like this every week. And subscribe to this channel. I put out new videos every week. And next, watch this.