The Benefits of Doing Things Badly
An imperfect call to take action
Dear reader,
It’s a humid afternoon in London, two hours before this letter is due to come out, and none of it’s been written. Coming back to writing for an audience after a few months away has widened the chasm between my vision and execution. As
put it eloquently in her essay, I’ve been suffering from the curse of excellence - to the point that it’s paralysed me from writing anything.So, I have no choice but to write badly1. Otherwise it won’t get written at all.
This paralysis of perfection is not uncommon.
I’m sure you can find situations in your own life where the pressure to do something perfectly has stopped you from event starting. But it’s in this very situation where the benefits of doing things badly bears transformative potential.
There is a hidden power in doing things badly. Not as a last resort, but as a strategy. A mindset. A way to move forward when your inner critic is screaming at you to stop. Because once you allow yourself to do something badly, you open the door to something much better: freedom, creativity, and alignment.
The first layer of doing things badly
Humans - to put it plainly - hate failing. There’s a visceral dread that fills our souls when we think about things going south. It’s not an unnatural reaction - there would’ve been many times in our pre-historic past when failure often did mean death, and so a fear of failure was a powerful survival mechanism. But at the same time, we also carry an embodied understanding that without taking some risk, without walking into some uncertainty, and without accepting some chance of failing, we would be stuck where we are forever. So what we really need to cultivate is a balance between these two forces.
Doing things badly tips the balance in favour of action rather than inaction, something most modern people need. When you accept that an action you take won’t be perfect, you break free from the outcome needing to be perfect. On the surface, this sounds like a bad trade - until you realise that the outcome of any action you take was not in your hands in the first place.
You have no say whether people will like you or your work.
The universe has no obligation to comply with your vision of how things should unfold.
Doing things badly opens you up to failure. It forces you to embrace this inevitable part of life. And failure - when not catastrophic - is our greatest teacher. Let me detour into some basic neuroscience to explain.
Your brain is a perception-prediction machine. You perceive the world in a certain way, and try to predict how certain actions will change it2. If your prediction matches the outcome, then all you do is reinforce existing assumptions3. But if your prediction doesn’t match the outcome, your brain updates its assumptions to make better predictions in the future. This process doesn’t feel good - we experience it as failure. But this process is what learning is.
Quite literally the only way to learn something new is to embrace the fact that you will perceive prediction error (i.e. learning) as failure. Spiritually, this isn’t new. But neuroscience is catching up, and you can see this mindset in action in surprising places; the company Flightstory has someone with the job title “Head of Failure”4, and Google X5 - the company’s secret research lab - actually rewards people for failure.
The second layer of doing things badly
Now, let’s take things further.
What if you actually try to do things badly? When you adopt this mindset, you’ve gone beyond just releasing yourself from the need for perfect outcomes. You enter a space where badly becomes a door to creativity.
In this space, you begin start to ask more interesting questions. How can I do this differently? How can I challenge some basic assumptions which I’ve taken for granted? And dare I suggest, how can I make this more fun and playful to do?
At this level, you begin to see that what you initially thought of as “doing something badly” is actually an invitation to do something differently. It invites you consider that by violating a norm or convention, you can open up entirely new dimensions of creativity, because you challenge assumptions that no one else even thought to question.
By the standards of traditional realism, Picasso painted badly. He deliberately rejected centuries of realistic representation. Instead of depicting subjects in lifelike proportions, he fragmented and abstracted them. But in this process, he opened up entirely new ways of seeing the world, and more importantly, shed a light on how human perception really works. His art went on to influence not just painting styles, but also architecture, literature, and design.
The third layer of doing things badly
There is one final place where doing things badly rather than not doing them at all is of vital importance. And this place is hidden, subtle and insidious. If you sit deeply, you will find that a lot of the dissatisfaction in your life comes from here, but it’s immensely hard to spot.
So where is this place?
It’s where you do the things you think you’re meant to do rather than the things you’re actually meant to do. There are so many parts of your life where - I can almost guarantee - you are doing things you think are productive, useful, or meaningful in place of real, aligned action. It’s really hard to spot this because it’s masked by the fact that you are already taking action, just not in the right direction. What’s harder is that your mind has probably rationalised that these actions as necessary and justified. But if you’re honest, you know they’re pointless and not moving you forward in any real sense.
The most common manifestation of this problem is the gap between thinking about doing vs. actually doing. Nassim Taleb would call it the difference between episteme (theoretical knowledge) and techne (real-world knowledge).
Reading about how to write well is not the same as wrestling with an empty page.
Listening to a podcast about nurturing relationships is not the same as showing up vulnerably to someone you care about.
Philosophising about life is not the same as living it.
What’s worse is walking a path meant for others rather than taking steps along your own. It’s all too easy for young people to look at successful idols and try to emulate their post success life, not realising that they are not in the same place, nor under the influence of the same circumstances.
Far better to walk your own path badly, than try to walk someone else’s perfectly.
Not everything should be done badly
Now I know there are some of you who might think that I am advocating you do everything badly. I’m not. Pilots shouldn’t be crashing planes and surgeons shouldn’t be killing patients.
This mindset shift really only applies in circumstances where there is:
A paralysis of perfection stopping you from taking action,
A sclerosis of doing the same things but expecting different results,
A myopia of misalignment - walking someone else’s path instead of your own,
No risk of catastrophic failure (like death).
Even then, this mindset must come from the right place: curiosity, playfulness, and acceptance of imperfection. It’s not a license to cause harm or to act without care. That’s just recklessness.
This is simply a call to remember:
Before you can get good and get smart, you have to get going.
Yours,
Zan.
What is Zen? Zen means doing anything perfectly, making mistakes perfectly, being defeated perfectly, hesitating perfectly, doing anything perfectly or imperfectly, perfectly. What is the meaning of this perfectly? How does it differ from perfectly? Perfectly is in the will; perfectly is in the activity. Perfectly means that at each moment of the activity there is no egoism in it… our pain is not only our own pain; it is the pain of the universe. The joy of the universe is also our joy. Our failure and misjudgment is that of nature, which never hopes or despairs, but keeps on trying.
- R. H. Blyth
Recommended reading from Substack:
- on Albert Camus and the fundamentals of evolution.
- on the nature of mistakes.
- on how to human more soulfully.
- on the courage to be different.
- on sharing her new direction.
This letter was written in one sitting, in less than an hour, with minimal editing.
This gives rise to limited, inductive reasoning.
I love that first quote from the Gita, it is freeing in some sense. And the idea of not letting perfection be the enemy of action is so important. It makes me think of the idea that perfectionism is an ego problem, which is an interesting and helpful reframe. I like the new aesthetic for the blog btw
We never have all the answers at the beginning of pretty much anything that we do. "Start now and figure things out along the way" has been my best hack for figuring things out.