Iteration is key to success

To ever be good at a thing you must first fail many times. When learning something new allow yourself room for failure. Set reasonable goals that allow you to fail repeatedly. You don’t have to write a book in one sitting but try to write a chapter. Do your best to finish projects and MOVE ON. A hundred ‘finished’ chapters can be edited into a book, but one perfect chapter is still just one chapter.

As a creator in the pursuit of bringing your visions to life your first attempts will let you down. Your ideas will outmatch your skill for your first twenty attempts, don’t let this stop you, make fifty, a hundred, five hundred attempts. Never stop trying and eventually your skill will catch up. Become comfortable and familiar with failure because even with massive success you will never escape it.

Understand your process and what you are physically capable of. If you can write an entire demo in one sitting, then do that every time. If you can finish a chapter every time you write, then do it. Create good habits so creation becomes reflexive, a natural state. Figure out your patterns and set reasonable, sustainable goals, so that when you inevitably fail you can avoid the struggle of fighting your way back to normalcy.

For example, if you write twice a week on Friday and Saturday nights, and write a chapter almost every time, by the end of the year you have a hundred-chapter book that can now be edited and revised. If you can only record once a week but you can tell a whole story with beat, hook, verse, and bridge each time, in three months you have an album that can now be refined and perfected. Iterate over and over and over and over until you find yourself, then keep going. When you feel comfortable it is often time for change.