Finding “good enough”
Of all of the images I could have chosen, this is one of them. (Image by Michael Seibt)
One of the most important things that I’ve learned from writing my own songs is how to find “good enough.”
There is a set point that a song needs to reach in which it feels good to sing it, the music and lyrics flow in a way that makes intuitive sense as a player and a listener, and it tells the story I intended for it to tell. Then, it’s complete. Put your pencil down.
I accepted as a teenager that my “good enough” would not be Jimi Hendrix’s or Paul McCartney’s “good enough,” and that there was nothing I could do about that except to keep writing songs.
Finding that set point on hundreds of songs has made the process easier.
And, in fact, my “good enough” has shifted. Though I have a fondness for a lot of my early songs and appreciate them for what they are, I now tend to have better ideas with better execution.
With what I know now, I could probably improve my early songs past their original set points. However, I gained that skill from writing many more songs. If I had just continued to try to improve my first song, I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere.
That’s the irony of perfectionism: If you are not willing to allow a thing to be complete, you won’t have a chance to get better on the next one. You’re missing out on the most important part of the learning. If you never finish a song, you’ll never be a songwriter.
Continuing to tinker past the song’s set point isn’t going to improve your results because your skills haven’t had a chance to improve. You’ll improve when you move on to the next song, and the next.
When I look back on the TikTok videos I made last summer, I’m amazed at the details I can see now that I didn’t see then. My cuts aren’t tight enough. My delivery of scripted videos is stilted, and I’m all over the place on the unscripted ones. My hooks aren’t engaging enough, and the points I’m trying to make are too abstract.
It’s true that I wouldn’t release some of those videos today, but I never would have gotten to this point without having released those videos.
We know that the way to get better is to practice consistently. However, some of us really struggle with the pain of being mediocre at the start, and we definitely don’t want to be mediocre in public. We want to go out to the woodshed and improve in private.
That will work up to a point, but you will probably have to share things before you feel ready. Otherwise, you’ll never leave the woodshed. If you refuse to settle for “good enough,” you will always be waiting to feel fully ready.
I still haven’t returned to the piano and guitar method books I was writing a few years ago. True, they needed to be tested as part of the development process, but I was always holding out for the ideal way to test. I didn’t realize that I could have decided what was good enough at each step of the way and build a concrete timeline for getting those things into the world.
The habit of shipping our work is a good one. It allows us to connect with others and get feedback. It also forces us to take that hard step of deciding that something is good enough and allow it to be complete. It turns out that doing this is the beginning, not the end.
