It feels weird to say this out loud, but most people don’t notice what I notice. They don’t notice when the door handle is a little jiggly. They don’t notice it takes a few extra clicks than it should to buy a movie ticket. They don’t notice that I coloured out of the lines a bit, or that the character I drew on one page doesn’t quite match the character I drew on the next.
Because I know people don’t notice those things, I’ve learned to let them go. Perfection can be paralysing and so I’ve found that by letting those things go, I can ship more work, get more feedback, and do better on the next project. In a commercial arrangement, done is better than perfect.
But, what if you’re only working on a project for yourself? When the person who consumes the work is the person who will notice those things?
I’ve almost finished a second graphic novella and I find myself poring over those pages looking for the things to ‘fix’. There is no client. There is no buyer. This story is for me. And so, I notice what’s not right and I feel compelled to change it until it is. It’s difficult to know when done is done.
It’s been a very long time since I’ve had that experience but remembering it feels nice. It’s worth remembering. Priorities in a commercial arrangement are (quite necessarily) different from the priorities we set for ourselves in our personal work. Being clear, from the outset, about who and what the project is really for may give us the best of both worlds – shipping and learning from commercial work, obsessing over the details when the work is just for us. Maybe, over time, they’ll rub off on each other and make both types of work better, too.