Hoarding Bad Work
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| #stacksandstacksofbadworkinphysicalform |
I've seen glimpses of those hoarder television shows where a concerned family member or some frightened neighbor will call in a group of people to help some poor soul with a "stuff" problem. There's always the establishing shot of the outside of the hoarder hole, run-down and filthy and popping at the seams with "stuff". There's always a cut of the piles of "stuff" with either rodent droppings or insects or both.
Some well-meaning soul who is expert at diagnosing "stuff" issues will come and talk to the optimist with all the "stuff" and try to talk them out of it. Maybe they're getting evicted if they don't clean up, maybe the city is condemning them for sanitary reasons, perhaps the collected "stuff" is killing them slowly.
These shows mostly end with the hoarder being at least partially rehabilitated and the property at least somewhat de-"stuff"-ed. They're meant to show how easy it is to slip into extreme hoarding habits, how out of control it can get. They show that even the worst of hoarders can at least be somewhat redeemed.
This is all to say that I think most creative people are extreme hoarders without realizing it. I'm not talking about "stuff", I'm talking about work. I'm talking ideas.
I've been thinking a lot recently about how much we all tend to hoard all of our old, bad, tired work. We hope that we'll have use for it somewhere, somehow. It'll all come back around again, right?
At times, I've found myself so afraid to lose a good idea, I'll hoard all the bad ones I'd had along the way in hopes that they'll show for something. The chance that they'd blossom and mature into the seed of a good idea. They'll sit and outlive the execution of most good ideas, languishing in whatever storage medium that caught them. Bad sketches, silly little renderings, sentence fragments that have no reason to exist.
We should all get rid of that old, bad work. Sure, it's fun to occasionally look back at how bad at something you were, but there's no need to keep the process. If we're smart, we learn from the failures, learn from what we'd done wrong. That's what should be kept. Hold on to the lesson, lose the evidence.
Nothing is proven by keeping bad work in perpetuity. There's nothing wrong with discarding the bad work once you've recognized it's bad. Great artists have their bad work hung up in museums all over the world, sure. But, it's covered over by their good work. The bad work gets erased, forgotten.
I'm committing myself to get rid of all my old, bad work. It's not coming back out, not gestating into some brilliant thing. It's bad work, the lesson has been learned, time to clear the "stuff". The more bad ideas I can get rid of, leave behind, the more room there is for beautiful ideas to eventually flourish.