There is a moment, just before creation begins, when the work exists in its most perfect form in your imagination. It lives in a crystalline space between intention and execution, where every word is precisely chosen, every brushstroke deliberate, every note inevitable, but only in your mind. In this prelapsarian state, the work is flawless because it is nothing: a ghost of pure potential that haunts the creator with its impossible beauty.
This is the moment we learn to love too much.
We become curators of imaginary museums, we craft elaborate shrines to our unrealized projects… The novel that will redefine literature. The startup that will solve human suffering. The artwork that will finally make the invisible visible.
But the moment you begin to make something real, you kill the perfect version that lives in your mind.
Creation is not birth; it is murder. The murder of the impossible in service of the possible.
the curse of vision
We are perhaps the only species that suffers from our own imagination. A bird building a nest does not first conceive of the perfect nest and then suffer from the inadequacy of twigs and mud. A spider spinning a web does not pause, paralyzed by visions of geometric perfection beyond her current capabilities. But humans? We possess the strange gift of being haunted by visions of what could be, tormented by the gap between our aspirations and our abilities.
This torment has a name in cognitive science: the "taste-skill discrepancy." Your taste (your ability to recognize quality) develops faster than your skill (your ability to produce it). This creates what Ira Glass famously called "the gap," but I think of it as the thing that separates creators from consumers.
Watch a child draw. They create fearlessly, unselfconsciously, because they have not yet developed the curse of sophisticated taste! They draw purple trees and flying elephants with the confidence of someone who has never been told that trees aren't purple, that elephants don't fly. But somewhere around age eight or nine, taste arrives like a harsh critic, and suddenly the gap opens. The child can see that their drawing doesn't match the impossible standard their developing aesthetic sense has conjured.
This is what leads most of us to stop drawing. Not because we lack talent, but because we've developed the ability to judge before we've developed the ability to execute. We become connoisseurs of our own inadequacy.
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