I Wasn’t Good, I Just Didn’t Stop
There is always a gap between who we’ve become and the ideal.
How many times have you finished something, whether that’s a piece of writing or drawing or some other creative endeavor, or a business or body you’ve been building, and saw the finished product and you feel discontented?
I’m not talking about the discontent as a result of some sort of failure, but the finished version never quite gets to the ideal you had in your mind.
The very thing in front of you carrying your labor and the thing as ideal just aren’t quite the same size or shape or color.
The idea is that if you just keep doing the thing then eventually the gap will close.
Here’s the secret: it doesn’t.
The idea will always move because of the labor in creating.
I remember staying up nights with a Roget’s Thesaurus scribbling into a notebook revising a poem to make it perfect while my girlfriend slept in the other room at 18 years old.
I found that poem a few years ago while moving, in that notebook with about 97 revisions in it, and all I could do was wince.
It hurt how bad it actually was.
And if you’ve built anything real, devoted years to something, not just a season like so many have, then you already know the tyranny of the gap.
Looking back at those early endeavors you can see, now, how unbelievably hard it was straining towards something that just wouldn’t or couldn’t hold.
As with any skill, we can only become proficient in it from the actual practice of it, and yet we can never close the gap between who we’ve become and the ideal.
The People Who Quit Were Better at It Than Me
I was in door-to-door sales for a long time and when I started I was the literal worst salesman I’ve ever seen.
Yet I just kept doing it until it started to produce fruits.
But I cannot tell you how many people I’ve had come into my office who were genuinely amazing at sales, way better than I was, who would quit because the difference between what they produced and the ideal was too immense for them to bear.
They expected effort to eventually be resolved and when it wasn’t, it was taken as a personal failure rather than the nature of the task.
If you’re actually creating something worthwhile then just know that the gap will never close.
Despite what some popular self-help books like The Compound Effect will try to delude you into thinking, neither an accumulation of skill nor time will ever close the gap.
Whatever you are striving or reaching for when you begin to make something real will move with you.
So the only actual choice one has is what to do with this fact.
What most people do is they treat this ever-present and permanent distance as the very evidence that they are simply not good enough, which eventually convinces them to stop whatever goal they’ve been pursuing.
And the only other option in my mind is to recognize the gap for what it is, as the cost one must pay in order to reach anything worth reaching for and to keep chasing to close it anyway.
A Poet Who Never Stopped Failing at the Same Sentence
T.S. Eliot brings us this infinite jest of labor plenty of times in Four Quartets, in many different contexts, but one of my favorites is in “Burnt Norton,” when he says that,
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.
If you Google that line, it seems like a lot of people, or perhaps AI, believe it’s about the general slipperiness of language, and yes it can certainly be read that way, but in the context of the full poem that reading gives way to another.
The larger theme of language in the poem seems to be that it is a relative medium, pointing towards the absolute, ie. the word pointing toward the “Word in the desert.”
Thus, the relative word is merely occasional; it breaks in its attempt to get towards the ideal and the transcendent; it is something which is time-bound trying to capture something which is outside time.
The gap between what he is able to produce with his chosen medium, language, can never be closed, and thus the words strain as the sound of the relative fails, exactly as it must, before the absolute.
He goes further in this critique of language as we move through the poem, finding its high point in “East Coker,” where he says “Trying to use words, and every attempt. / Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure,” meaning that each new line he composes is completely new, like he’s somehow not this poet who happened to write two of the best poems of the 20th century.
There is no point at which the difficulty of working at his craft resolves into mastery, because mastery is what an outsider sees looking at the maker; however, that’s not the maker’s experience.
Humility is the maker’s relationship to the gap which cannot close.
I do not mean the kind of humility which is born out of a relationship towards others, where we have the connotation of a modesty or an unassuming nature.
It is the humility of the maker’s recognition, that is held in advance before the practice begins, that what we make can never equal the ideal we are in service of, and the decision to pursue it anyway.
That is the cost of creating something authentic.
It is this ongoing, unglamorous willingness to keep reaching for something you already know you can’t fully reach.
This Was Never About Writing
Although I used Eliot to illustrate this, it was never about writing poetry; this is about creating anything worthwhile.
The company one is trying to build, which will never reach the vision, or the body that is the ongoing development, striving for the vision which got someone in the gym, and yes, a piece of writing which can never say the same thing as it lived in the writer’s head before language touched it.
The secret is that what looks like mastery to the outside world, is just the one who stopped expecting the gap to close and kept working inside it with humility.
The ones who have quit along the way are the ones who expected the gap to close.
Mastery is the willingness to be seen reaching for something you haven’t reached, openly, again and again, without deluding yourself it’ll ever be different.