Patience
Your Standards Are Not Too High. Your Patience Is Too Short.
You keep making things that disappoint you. Not disastrous things — competent ones, that fall clearly short of what you were aiming at, and the gap between the two is wide enough to be discouraging every single time.
The usual conclusion is that your standards are too high. They are not. Your standards are the most valuable thing you have. What is too short is the patience.
The gap
The clearest description of this belongs to the broadcaster Ira Glass, who has talked about it in an interview that has circulated widely among people making things.
His observation: people get into creative work because they have good taste. But for the first few years, what you make is not good — it is trying to be good, and it does not get there. The crucial part is that your taste is still working perfectly the whole time. You can see exactly how far short the thing falls, because the taste that drew you in is more developed than the skill that has to execute it.
That mismatch is why this period hurts so specifically. You are not blind to the flaws — you are the person best equipped to see them. And Glass's point is that this is precisely the stage where most people quit, because they read the gap as evidence they lack the talent, when it is actually evidence they have the taste.
His answer was volume. The gap closes by producing a large amount of work, and it closes at the speed of finished pieces rather than at the speed of intention.
The gap is not a verdict. It is what having good taste feels like before your hands catch up.
Why lowering the standard does not help
The instinctive fix — care less, accept the work as it is — is a bad trade, and it fails for a mechanical reason.
Your taste is the error-detection system. It is what tells you the second paragraph is weak, the transition is clumsy, the shot is boring. Blunt it and you have not made the work better; you have made yourself unable to see what is wrong with it, which stops improvement entirely.
People who lower their standards do not become happier and productive. They become fluent at producing work that does not improve, which is a worse position than being frustrated by good taste.
What should change is not the standard but the deadline. Keep the standard for what the work should eventually be. Remove the requirement that it be reached this month.
Good things are slow, and that is what makes them good
There is a reason worth stating plainly: the wait is not incidental to quality. It is one of the sources of it.
Work that is good is usually good because of the number of decisions in it, and decisions accumulate at a fixed rate — you cannot make three years' worth of judgement calls in a fortnight. It is also good because of the number of bad versions that preceded it, each of which took a real amount of time to produce and evaluate.
That is why the things you admire could not have been made quickly. Not because their makers were slow, but because quality is partly a function of iterations, and iterations take calendar time.
It also helps to know that the gap is not evenly distributed across your abilities. Usually one part of the work catches up first — structure, or technique, or judgement — while another lags badly, and the piece fails on the weakest component. Naming which component is behind turns a vague sense of inadequacy into a specific thing to practise, which is the difference between a year of frustration and a year of improvement.
Waiting properly
Patience here is not passivity, and it is not simply feeling calm about the situation. It is a specific behaviour: keep producing at a steady rate while accepting that the gap will remain open for a while.
The version that works has three parts. Produce and finish — not endless revision of the same piece, but a series of completed things, because the gap closes on finished work. Keep the taste sharp by continuing to consume work better than yours, even when it stings. And compare across long intervals, since across a week you will see nothing, and across a year you will see the whole slope.
The people who come out of this stage are not the ones who felt best about it. They are the ones who kept finishing things while feeling bad about them.
What to do with this
- Keep the standard, move the deadline. "This is not good enough yet" is accurate and useful. "This should already be good enough" is neither.
- Count finished pieces. The gap closes by volume, so track the number of things completed rather than how any one of them felt.
- Set a fixed cycle. One piece a week or a month, shipped on schedule at whatever quality it reached. Cycles produce volume; open-ended perfection does not.
- Re-read your old work once a year. This is the only reliable way to see that the gap has been moving while you were inside it.
- Expect the discomfort to persist. Taste keeps developing too. The gap narrows, but it rarely closes entirely — and people who do good work generally still feel it.
Your standards are not the problem. They are the reason you can tell the difference between what you made and what you meant, which is the whole engine of getting better.
Good things are slow. That is what makes them good. Wait properly.