Make Something Everyday

I've been compiling years and years worth of "advice and insight" from the internet. No source has been too small for me in this endeavor. And I often stock it away like pennies in a childhood piggy bank. One day it will be enough to use for something big... one day. But one of the topics that sticks out — and by that I mean every time I hear it, I get some feeling of guilt like I already knew the answer but was pretending to discover it each time — is the idea of working to publish. Making something for consumption beyond yourself, and doing so frequently. I go back and forth on the idea, as I do find value in refinement — the careful planning and pruning of an idea into an executional topiary that would stand out in anyone's life garden. And working to publish seems to fly in the face of that concept; saying good enough and moving on before any hard work is actually done. But the other side of this creative moon can be equally cold. I've spent so much time on a project that I actually made it worse through needless refining — toiling away on details that had no right or wrong and thus could be infinitely toiled upon. I've also allowed too many projects to get put back on the shelf, to be fine-tuned some other day, only to realize that I was amassing a home library of unfinished works. You'd find them all filed away in the "fear and laziness" section. And I've also spent weeks and months on what I thought would be a masterpiece only to find it received but a passing glance from even the closest of family members. The truth seems to be you can't know the outcome, so just focus mostly on output. And if you can keep doing that; if you keep stacking dominoes of small creative works, you'll not only find the most joy, but you'll increase your surface area for success. You'll have more things to actually show (not just "I almost did this thing that would have been great"), and more things to learn and grow from, you'll find less worry that each individual project needs to be a success, and eventually you may even have a masterwork; but you won't care too much, you'll just move on to the next thing and enjoy the process of making.