There is always a gap between the creation and the creator’s initial vision.
At some point, you need to call your work “done”. You need to overcome the perfectionistic urge and leave some of your material on the cutting room floor. But it is painful to accept that some of your ideas or efforts are not worthy. And if you cannot acknowledge that, you end up in a creative trap.
I first noticed this when building products. For all the advice that abounds regarding the creation of a “minimum viable product” and “avoiding feature creep”, I always see the opposite practiced (even on “Agile” teams). It is easy to think up grand ideas for what your system will do. It is easy to add just one more thing to the list, no matter where you are at in the product development lifecycle. But once it is on the list, you don’t want to let it go. It becomes a fight – “the development team is tanking the product – they just can’t get the work done on schedule, and now they are threatening us with cutting features to make the ship date!” Or, more likely, the team struggles with delay after delay in order to implement every feature and requirement that is imagined along the way, regardless of the actual value, finally shipping a product years late. Or maybe they never even ship at all.
After expanding my creative practices, I realize that leaving material on the cutting room floor is as much a part of the creative experience as the creation itself. It doesn’t matter if you are building a product, writing an essay, creating a course, telling a story, giving a speech, writing a poem, cooking a harmonious meal, or planting a garden. You need to simplify. You need to cut away the inessential so that the essential can truly shine.
These are simple ideas, but that doesn’t mean they are easy to apply.
I am facing this challenge now, as I prepare the initial release of Designing Embedded Software for Change. I have literally hundreds of ideas for the course that did not make the cut. Sources that I never read. Patterns and demonstrations and model software that I did not publish. I worry every day that there are some critical ideas in those notes. I continually feel tempted to add just one more lesson. I could probably work for another year getting all of that packaged and ready to go. And if I did that, it would be too much.
In fact, I already felt that what I built was too much. I made the painful decision right at the end to remove an entire module from the course. I worked hard on that module. It was the one that pushed me the most. But it didn’t pull its weight relative to the rest of the course, and I feel like the flow is better without it.
For now, Version 1 of the course is “feature complete”, and all that remains is copyediting. Some critical ideas will be considered for inclusion in Version 2.
The rest of the ideas will remain on the cutting room floor. Who knows, maybe they will be picked up as part of another project.