Every successful artist makes garbage. Every single one. No exception.
Every struggling artist, every artist trying to gain traction or has no traction at all makes no garbage.
Wait, what? The best make garbage and the worst make nothing? How does that work? That’s right. Seth Godin asks middling or anonymous writers to “show me your bad writing.” Professionals make garbage because it’s only through working through garbage that you might make something good.
Kevin Hart, the arena-packing comedian, told Joe Rogan on the Joe Rogan Experience:
People don’t understand how hard it is to develop an hour of stand-up material. People act like you just turn on a new hour. It’s an hour. To get to an hour, you’re going through four to five hours of bullshit you thought was funny.
Four to five hours of material to get to one hour of greatness.
So the minute you think you’re not making enough good work, maybe the problem is you’re not making enough garbage.
