Fill in the following sentence for me, will you? Anything worth doing is worth doing…
Did you opt for the word ‘well’ by any chance? Did you say ‘anything worth doing is worth doing well?’
That’s what I would have said a while ago. I would have said anything worth doing is worth doing well, because that’s the expression I remember from my youth, maybe even going back to my primary school days. We were taught to give everything our all, to apply ourselves to everything we did, to always do our best, or to not bother at all. It was a go-big-or-go-home mindset. No room for any sort of middle ground.
Imagine my surprise then, and the cognitive dissonance that racked my mind for ages when I came across a twist on the old expression that changed it like so:
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly
I came across this idea some time ago while on a mindless trawl through social media. I’m so glad I did too, because it stayed with me. This flipped the saying on its head, and put into question everything I’d believed and been taught about pursuing goals, both big and small. The idea is simple. While it’s nice and admirable to do things to the best of one’s ability, the desire to aspire to, or strive for perfection often gets in the way of getting started in the first place.
It’s like being at the starting point of a marathon or some other long-distance race where you can’t see the finish line, and feeling so overwhelmed by the road ahead of you. When the gun fires or the bell goes off, you might as well throw your hands in the air and go ‘what’s the point of getting started anyway?’ You might think you’ll never reach that finish line because you can’t see it from the starting point.
This is how daunting some pursuits can be, and it doesn’t even have to apply to only the lofty ones like running marathons. It applies to trivial, mundane, and everyday tasks too, like (as the original post highlighted) brushing your teeth. If you were in the depths of despair or depression for instance, you may struggle to summon the energy to get out of bed and stand over the bathroom sink to brush your teeth for the whole recommended two minutes, two times a day. This might be just a huge undertaking that would require summoning gargantuan amounts of energy. The easy thing, the human thing to do in such a position, is to not brush your teeth at all. If you were to adhere to the old advice, you might as well not brush your teeth if you can’t brush your teeth well. Except, you would risk further dental complications that would undoubtedly compound and cause more problems down the line, not to mention the issues around personal hygiene. Admittedly, in such a position, imminent bad breath and future dental cavities would probably be bottom of your list of worries and problems, maybe even off the list completely.
So what to do? This detraction from conventional wisdom suggests that you could start small. It doesn’t matter how small, as long as you start. Keeping with the dental hygiene analogy, if you can’t get out of bed, perhaps you could gargle with mouthwash and spit it out into a bucket by the side of your bed, or if you can get yourself over to the bathroom sink, you could apply some toothpaste on your toothbrush head and run it over your teeth for 10 seconds, to begin with. It hardly matters what you do, really. What’s important is the act of showing up as much (and as little) as you can, and building up the reps, because that’s when the magic happens.
When you show up once, you’re more likely to show up again, and again, and again. Showing up 3 days a week for 10 seconds might not seem as good as showing up 2 times a day for 2 whole minutes, but it is better than not showing up at all, because those little actions compound.
This is not a dental advice blog. It is hardly any sort of advice blog really. I like to think of it as a reflective, creative, journal, in so far as I write what I write for myself as much as my readers. So whatever topics I explore on this blog undoubtedly come back to some sort of creative process or pursuit.
We’re in that time of the year when we’re starting to fall behind on our new year's resolutions, or maybe even abandoning them completely. Maybe you decided to take up daily journaling, or practising painting or writing or drawing or singing on a daily schedule. The day will undoubtedly come when something gets in the way, and you’ll have a choice to make. Maybe that day has already come, maybe it hasn’t. You may decide that if you can’t stick to your goal of practising guitar scales for a whole 30 minutes, then you might as well skip that day and do it well the next day. Or, you might decide to pick up the guitar anyway and do it for just 30 seconds. The latter is more likely to get you to maintain your streak. The thing is, if you can summon the space to do it for 30 seconds, you might find that once you’ve started, you might want to carry on for a few more minutes, and you might just hit that 30-minute mark. Or you might not. The point is, you’ll never hit that 30-minute mark if you don’t get started, and you’re more likely to get started if you lower the barriers of entry by telling yourself you only have to do it for only 30 seconds, to begin with. This applies to just about any creative practice I can think of, and perhaps other aspects of life too.
This is not to say that we should jettison all pursuits of excellence. We should always strive for progress, however small. Here again, I’ll stress that we should aim for progress, not perfection. The key is to ensure that this striving for higher standards doesn’t prevent you from getting started in the first place.
The first main blog post I published when I started my weekly newsletter in the spring of 2022 was titled Do The Thing. I wrote this in the context of pursuing the artistic and creative exploits you feel drawn to, despite whatever challenges may be holding you back.
Here I am once again, with a play on that title, to encourage you to just do the thing, badly, because if you can do it just once, badly, then perhaps you can do it again, and again, and again, until you find yourself doing it better than badly, and maybe even starting to enjoy it, so that it might reignite that desire in your heart to want to learn how to do it well.
Anything worth doing may be worth doing to the best of your abilities, but if the best you can do is considered bad by whatever societal standards exist, then anything worth doing is worth doing badly, to begin with.
PS: Just a reminder that my latest record, All Behind is out now, everywhere. You can listen to it on several platforms. Please share it with a friend, share it with your social networks, and consider subscribing to the newsletter (below), my YouTube channel, or wherever else you listen to music.