Fast, bad, wrong, the unconventional path to growth
Want to get good fast, want to get stuff done and put it out there? To no longer worry and get going, then get good. Live by this rule:
Fast
Bad
Wrong
Now, this might sound counterintuitive, but I want you to realise that the less you aim for perfection or getting something right the first time round, the quicker you will advance at the task at hand. Sounds counterintuitive, right? Making something quickly, badly, with low quality and in all the wrong ways will help you get better at the thing? Yea right! The answer is yes, and let me tell you why.
Fast
The more you do something, the more you turn that process into a habit. The more you make content, the easier it becomes to perform that task. The faster you do it, the less you focus on perfection; the importance lies in doing it and continuing forward. Think of it like a HIT workout class – at the end of the task, you are tired, sweaty, you may have messed up, produced or executed things of poor quality, but you did it. You did it all in record time. Now you can move on to other things. The faster you start and complete a task the quicker you can learn from it. You experience speeds up, and in this world that's everything now in this fast pasted economy.
Bad
Do it badly. This could be interpreted in different ways, such as using bad tools, the wrong app, writing a book in a Gmail account, or using a blue pen to draw a portrait instead of using a camera. On the other side, 'bad' could mean producing a really, really, really bad first draft – getting it done with all the rough edges and stains you've made along the way. Don't worry about spelling errors or grammar; just get the words down on paper and out of your brain. 'Bad' in this context means, if someone looked at it, they might think you were creating rubbish. That's the bad we want to create, and we want to create piles and piles of garbage, quickly.
Wrong
Now we get into 'wrong'. Make it wrong, don't follow a guide, formula, or system. Just do it without foundations to hold it up, no structure or linear process. Do what you feel like, and don't worry if it breaks all the rules – in fact, the more rules you break, the better. This could be painting on a shoe instead of a canvas, writing a blog post on a mirror and documenting it instead of on a website. 'Wrong' is all about being structure-less, different, not on purpose but because it was convenient, it was all you had – wrong.
The power of doing it fast, bad, and wrong
Do all three of these things in that order, and you will get somewhere. You will learn, fail, and break things along the way. But you will do all those things quickly. You will find that in the process of making something quickly, badly, and in all the wrong ways, you are learning along the way. You are creating an exorbitant amount of work and not worrying about perfection. It's setting you free to make mistakes and learn much faster than anyone else in your niche or field. Because they are playing it safe, following that guidebook, a set of systems that are shown to so called work. Whereas you… you are doing rather than planning, and that is fare more productive. You have moved away from hypotheticals and fantasy, into reality.
Break free from perfection
So, if you want to get good at what you do, and get there faster than anyone else, throw away perfection and quality, and focus on raw output. Do it fast, bad, and wrong as quickly and consistently as you can. Trust me, you will learn and find your own way much faster than anyone else you know because you are willing to put in the work and understand that "perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor" - Anne Lamott. Or another way of saying it, prolific over prefect.
