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The most important aspect for me is in setting reasonable, concrete benchmarks that you can self-assess. Although good teaching and mentoring can be helpful, ex
by syntheweave 5y ago
The most important aspect for me is in setting reasonable, concrete benchmarks that you can self-assess. Although good teaching and mentoring can be helpful, external opinion is also the source of many bad benchmarks - all too often nobody will be there to give advice more specific than "this is good, that is bad".
To get better benchmarks, you have to do some philosophy to set up principles that you can judge yourself with. This can be daunting but is much more effective than trying things at random. Once you have them, though, your self-assessments become much more reasonable and perfectionism will recede: You know what it takes to go from 90% to 99%, and can weigh that against developing in other respects.
- rednalexa 5y agoI like the idea: do you have any examples of it in practice?
- syntheweave 5y agoI often apply it from the beginning for creative projects. For example if I am writing a story, I will need to consider "what makes a good story". If I were to develop the benchmark for this by consulting a list of "top 10 ways to make a good story," or did my research by looking at best-sellers, then I would only be capable of writing cliches. It would be very hard to get off of the blank page without just copying a complete work and then trying to modify parts. But if I decide on particular concepts of good for this story, suddenly the path becomes clarified. And so I might select a theme to explore, a word or a phrase like "sunshine on a cloudy day", and then develop the basis of the story by making the contents abductively(as in abductive reasoning) similar to that theme - by inventing characters, settings and plot devices that would suggest similar ideas and then seeing how I could make them work together. As I add more, additional themes and principles might come up and I would navigate their use by looking for ways in which they are compatible with the primary theme. If there are contradictions between two themes, then I will have to resolve them or else drop exploration in that direction. And you can see that there is a lot of work that would go into developing the story from a set of themes into a finished narrative, but it is also not work that would go in circles; there is a start and end to it, a point at which it definitely communicates the theme, and does so efficiently. The rest is a matter of adding some polish, smoothing out the particulars of the telling. It would only grow unbounded and become a truly "perfectionist" endeavor if I allowed too many contradictory elements to slip in and create problems, or burdened myself with too many technical constraints like those found in a top 10 or "do's and don'ts" list of quick-fixes. That advice can solve particular problems, but it comes after having a good foundation.
- rednalexa 5y agoThanks for sharing. That is a good strategy to try as I do often let things go either unbounded with no constraints or with too many constraints.