You Can't Rip the Skin Off the Snake
It Takes As Long As It Takes
Any time I speak with creators, authors, artists, and podcasters, they often refer to their stalled creative projects as “failures.”
These are all people who have accomplished a lot in life. Some of them have created podcasts that arose to millions of listeners in the course of a year. Some of them have worked for the biggest and most famous firms and Fortune 50 companies in the world. Some of them have had incredibly successful exits from startups they built out of nothing.
They’ve all dealt with real failure in life, so it’s surprising to me to hear anyone in that position refer to a stalled or slow-moving project as a “failure.”
Why do they think it’s a failure? They all had guilt about the length of time it was taking them to complete what they set out to do.
All of the judgment is based on the assumption that they correctly evaluated what it would take to complete the project in the first place.
Or that they had a clear, realistic vision of what “complete” would look like.
What do you want to bet that’s the case? ;)
Here's an idea: what if we all let up on the idea that you should be able to create any creative work in some ridiculous and astonishingly small amount of time? Or that, if it’s your first time doing it, that you are even remotely qualified to decide how fast it should go, or how “complete” will really look?
Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings took 10-12 years to write.
It took Beethoven more than six years to finish Symphony No. 9… and according to historians, it had a “gestation period that exceeded 30 years.”
It took Leonardo da Vinci around four years to complete the initial version of the Mona Lisa.
Impactful, moving, astounding things are not built in a weekend. They take time and dedication, and that includes the time to let a project lie fallow while you live life and gather the necessary experiences to bring the idea to a head.
It takes as long as it takes. It's like the late Baba Ram Dass said: "You've got to go at the rate you can go. You can't rip the skin off the snake. The snake must molt the skin. That's the rate it happens.”
There are no failed projects until the creator totally abandons the endeavor. You have not failed. You just haven't finished yet.
And that's okay—you've got to go at the rate you can go. It takes as long as it takes.
Love that! I see writing as a sort of Jenga - there's a lot of pieces but some are still too stuck to take out. I guess it's the same idea.