A result of thoughts

[Amaro Bikes]

Accept apologizes if not the right place to come with this... but I read this today and it rang a bell on the frame building question...

[bencooper]

If you're going to actually make a living at framebuilding, the ability to say "F*** it, that'll do" is a very useful skill. Excessive perfectionism is a curse...

[zetroc]

Yup. "The perfect is the enemy of the good."

[Amaro Bikes]

Well, I'm not the most appropiate person to speak about this, but to me the only way to go is endless search of perfection, never getting "satisfied" as perfection will almost never happen, but each frame should be the new essay to get as close as possible. Sure, it's quite frustrating, specially when being so untalented as it's my case, but hey, that's part of this job's hook, an endless and almost useless lost battle, like cure's "forest".
Each day is a new judgement day... maybe tomorrow I'll save myslef from hell's fire, till then, will keep breaking my brain to understand and improve.

[theflashunc]

As someone who's made a living for a decade (and counting) on the quality of "Me write words good" I can totally relate. I've had award winning stuff I absolutely cringe at reading, and am easily my own worst critic. While I agree that perfect can be the enemy of good, if you think "good enough" is good enough often enough, you'll soon be by the wayside.

The best writers I know, to a man and woman, are by far their own harshest critics. I think its a necessary component for success in this kind of field.

[bencooper]

That's not quite what I was saying. I'm never entirely satisfied with anything I build - there's always a fillet that could be a little neater, a curve that could be a little smoother. I try as hard as possible to make every frame better than the last.

But to make a living at this, you have to be ruthless with how much time you spend on each frame.

[nash]

Eventually you have to say, 'enough,' and send it to the publisher.

[theflashunc]

That's not quite what I was saying. I'm never entirely satisfied with anything I build - there's always a fillet that could be a little neater, a curve that could be a little smoother. I try as hard as possible to make every frame better than the last.

But to make a living at this, you have to be ruthless with how much time you spend on each frame.

Ah, so we're basically on the same page then. My intense self-loathing for my own work is admittedly my own neurotic pessimism. I struggle sometimes with how much "the work" would suffer if that went away though.

[devlin]

Do you think you feel that because you're making a living from it? In other words, does the impending readers critique in turn make you critique your work beyond what is needed?