Previously, on my note:
“Everyone talks about unfinished work… Projects sitting in forgotten folders. Ideas that never became anything.
But I don’t think artists suffer from unfinished work.
I think we suffer from premature completion.
The project ends long before we ever touch it… Inside our heads.
Artists don’t procrastinate because they’re lazy. They procrastinate because they mentally finish the work before reality has a chance to participate.”
Fun fact, or should I say not so fun fact, I find it hard to look at my own work once I’ve posted it.
At first I thought that it’s simply because I hated them. After I uploaded something, I had to close that account and never reopen it until I forget about it, or until the next time I’m trying to post. It was so bad that I had to create a whole another account where I can be ‘free’ even though that freedom is literally how I get here in the first place.
I couldn’t really pin point when exactly it happened but I become this person who is…idealistic. After I posted something, if I don’t immediately close the app and instead went to see what I posted on the eye of the viewer; something insane happened:
Oh my, it’s not centered.
Wait it’s supposed to be 0.5% more zoomed in.
No this should’ve been the cover instead.
The color doesn’t match the other.
Why does the caption sounds a little tacky?
Even though I was so excited on posting it, once I do, I became my biggest critique.
I never even realized that I had that crazy side of me until one of my best friends who turned on post notification for my account suddenly DM-ed me “Is this one of those days where you’re gonna delete-reupload your post for 15times before you’re done? no hate, just asking so I know when I can finally press the like button.”
Then it hit me; what is wrong with me?
But that’s not all. I tried changing my game. Maybe to avoid doing that, I should just spend more time on the preparation to make sure that it looks super good before actually putting it out.
Guess what, I ended up never posting anything..
I used to spend weeks, sometime months planning. Future-proofing. Trying to make sure every idea would work before I let it exist. It felt productive, it looked responsible but when someone asked me, “So…what have you been making lately?”
I had nothing to show.
Not because I lacked ideas.
Because I had already lived them in my imagination.
Because I was so busy planning and thinking ahead that I forgot to take my first step.
The amount of work that has been left unfinished—sometimes even unstarted—is insanely a lot.
Most of my time I live inside my head, planning, waiting for the right moment, trying to future-proof everything when the truth is; I haven’t even started anything yet.
In the end? I never got anywhere.
I was stuck in my own place.
Artists suffer from premature completion.
Artists often don’t fail because they can’t create. They fail because they mentally finish the project before starting. The imagined masterpiece becomes impossible to match. Thinking becomes a substitute for discovering and then, creation dies.
Before writing the first sentence, we’ve already imagined the reviews.
Before launching the business, we’ve imagined its failure.
Before painting, we’ve compared it to every masterpiece we’ve ever admired.
The work becomes impossible to begin because we’re no longer starting from page one, we’re trying to recreate page two hundred.
How could reality ever compete with something imagination created without gravity?
Because imagination has no deadlines.
No budget.
No clients changing their minds.
No failed exports.
No awkward first drafts.
Reality does.
And reality will always lost to imagination—until you let reality participate.
One thing I keep reminding myself is this: thinking generates hypotheses, reality generates data. Thinking tells me what might happen, reality tells me what actually happened;
They’re not the same thing. Experience is information.
And that’s something that I’ve been subconsciously doing. Collect data. Don’t conclude. Observe.
How do you collect data?
By failing.
Because the universe doesn’t reward certainty.
It rewards adaptation.
Businesses pivot.
Scientists revise theories.
Artists repaint.
People heal.
Relationships evolve.
Nature itself is unfinished.
Curiosity isn’t weakness, it’s delayed certainty.
But certainty only arrives after you’ve taken the first step.
Artists understand this instinctively.
There’s a reason artists procrastinate.
It’ isn’t always laziness.
Sometimes it’s perfection arriving before creation.
They want the finished painting before the first brushstroke.
The perfect book before its first sentence.
The perfect company before the first customer.
The perfect relationship before the first conflict.
But creation doesn’t work that way. Reality has to reveal itself.
The painting teaches the painter,
The business teaches the entrepreneur,
The relationship teaches the lover,
The work teaches the artists;
You can’t think your way into knowledge that only experience can give.
You see,
Every masterpiece spent far longer unfinished than finished.
We just never got to witness that part cause the irony… is that we only admire finished work.
We forgot to admire unfinished sketches,
Half-written novels,
Prototype businesses,
Messy conversations,
Awkward first attempts,
Every piece of work we admire once looked embarrassingly incomplete.
Lately I’ve stopped asking, “What if this isn’t good enough?”
Instead I ask, “What information am I refusing to collect?”
Because that’s all the first draft really is: data.
The first client? data.
The first rejection? data.
The first awkward conversation? data.
The more I continue my life journey, the more I realized that the learning comes exactly when you fail. I’m not saying that you have to fail first to learn, but I believe that the amount of learning you get as you fail is very much worth it to the pain you get from it.
Every major lesson in my life arrived because I was willing to leave a question unanswered for a little longer, but also make a decision to move forward with life before I started questioning it.
You don’t become better by thinking longer, you become better by collecting better information.
Maybe that’s why artists don’t need more certainty, maybe we need more unfinished work out there. because reality has a habit of teaching things imagination never could. After all, every masterpiece spent far longer unfinished than finished. Maybe the goal was never to become someone who always gets it right.
Maybe the goal is simply to become someone who’s willing to stay unfinished long enough to become something real, but of course, that’s just my thoughts for now. Still learning, always curious.
– a curious creative
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