Don’t Edit the Success from Your Life
A tale about Grandpa, apple sauce, and a wooden potato
A man sat in the shade on his porch in a rocking chair. It was too hot to do anything else. He held a chunk of wood in his left hand and a pocket knife in the other. For as long as he could remember, he had passed the slow times by whittling.
The piece of pine he held didn’t look like anything in particular. It hadn’t told him what it wanted to be yet, but it would. Long ago, he had learned that the wood would let him in on the grand secret when it was ready.
When the man tumbled the piece of wood in his hands, he could see all kinds of things that it could be. A wagon. An alligator, maybe. Perhaps, an old Navajo chief. But at that moment, it kind of looked like a wooden potato.
Years ago, his grandfather had taught him the secret to whittling.
He’d say, “No need to get in a rush now, son. If you don’t slow down, you’ll whittle that piece of pine down to nothin’, and then I’ll have to go and get you a piece of quartz to carve away on. At the rate you are going, there won’t be any damn trees left.”
Grandpa leaned back in his chair and looked down at an intricately carved figurine of a petite Lakota Sioux woman in his hand. The leather pouch over her shoulder looked like it was made of soft buckskin. The beads around her neck only needed to be painted shades of blue and white to be finished. And the expression on her face was one of sadness.
“How do you make ’em look so real, Grandpa?”
“Well, you take your time, son. And when it’s finished you stop, or you’ll end up with a pile of shavings instead of what the piece of wood wants to be.”
The world seems to expect too much. So, people try too hard to do everything perfectly. And since perfection will never exist, by trying to achieve it, they often fail to realize that they passed the finish line a long time ago.
You can only cut an apple in half once. If you keep chopping and chopping, you won’t even have an apple anymore. You’ll have apple sauce.
Now, of course, there are uses for apple sauce just like there are uses for wood shavings. But if you need a solid piece of wood or a chunk of apple, you will wish that you had realized that perfection is an impossibility and that the work you were doing was good enough, so you wouldn’t have kept going.
I have been a sound engineer and producer for over two decades. I produce instrumental tracks for artists to use to record their lyrics on top of. Producing a great song is akin to writing a great piece. When it’s right, it’s right. Editing it over and over will only cause it to lose what soul it had and eventually, it will be an entirely new piece altogether. And it will most likely be trash at that point.
There are no set rules when adding the critical components of a track together. Of course, you want them to have the proper rhythm, and you want them to be in the correct key. But other than that, what you add makes the song your own.
Imagine that you are composing a song. First, you add a punchy bassline to give it drive. Next, you add a brass section in the background to carry the harmony. Then, you add some strings or a guitar to play out the melody and provide some emotion. Lastly, you add some basic percussion like a snare, a kick drum, and a high hat to give it a spine. You like how it sounds, but it still sounds empty to you for some reason.
So you start digging through a plethora of different percussion instruments, ambient backgrounds, vocal hits, stabs, chants, and a million other random sounds looking for the missing pieces. These things can either make a track golden or turn it into auditory chaos depending on how you use them and how many you add.
You start slowly by trying out different sounds and looping them to be placed throughout the track. It has begun to sound a bit more robust. You like how it sounds now, but you just know that it can be better.
Remember this moment right here. This is the point where you should STOP. You aren’t even sure what the artist is going to record or what types of voice-overs and background vocals they are going to add.
But you don’t because you are sure of two things:
- This isn’t perfect….. yet.
- You CAN make it better.
So you continue adding, removing, moving, changing, rearranging, distorting, lowering, raising, compressing, and expanding sounds. Now, it sounds nothing like it did before when you should have stopped. And since you were so confident that you could make it sound better, you never saved a backup of what it sounded like.
When it comes to most things in life, you should think about Grandpa’s advice. And as most things in life don’t always have automatic saves and edit histories, if you end up going too far, the only way to get back to where you were is to restart from the beginning. And then, you most likely won’t have the same outcome.
When writing, take your time and quit doubting yourself. That will make it easier to see when the piece you have written is finished so you can stop.
Don’t let the world’s insistence on perfection cause you to doubt yourself. We tend to help ourselves off the gallows directly into a pit filled with spikes and fire by doubting our work is ever good enough while simultaneously knowing that we can make it perfect.
When you start writing an article, is it your goal to write two? Well, that’s what you are doing when you write to the point where your project is great and then edit it so much that it is a completely new piece.
Do you think Grandpa ever picked up a piece of wood and a pocket knife because he needed some mulch?
I promise that if you can recognize when your writing project is good enough before you make a run for perfection, you will find the editing process to be much less strenuous and find writing to be much more rewarding.
And by the way, the wood told me it was happy being a potato, and that was good enough for me.
