Douglas Adams' note to self reveals author found writing torture
I relate to this deeply as a creative person. I'm in the middle of trying to bootstrap some businesses this year, and the act of creating these things is such torture sometimes.<p>Which is weird right? I've left my day job, I'm doing exactly what I want to do, working on exactly what I want to work on, so it should be great all the time right? And yet the daily emotional sensations I feel while actually doing the work is usually a mixed bag. Every once in a while I'll have a fantastic day where I feel great about what I'm doing from start to finish, but sometimes just defeating the resistance within me and getting any trivial amount of work done is the best I can do.<p>A lot of it comes down to basic quality of many creative endeavors: starting is easy, and finishing is hard. You can start anything, but if you work for long enough eventually you arrive at this ugly middle place. The part of the journey where you start to notice all the warts and imperfections of what you're making, when your limits start to show themselves, when the picture of the thing in your mind starts to diverge from what you're realistically capable of doing. Seeing that, knowing that it was you who created all of that "crap," and _still_ pushing through it to get to the flawed, imperfect, compromised final product, THAT is tough.<p>I suspect this is what Adams was expressing: "Arthur Dent is a burk. He does not interest me." Or expressed differently: "This character I've created is starting to become ugly in his imperfections, and I feel like I'd rather throw the work away than continue with it."<p>If you're curious to read more, I write about these kinds of ideas in this part of a recent blog I wrote: <a href="https://startupinamonth.net/month-two-week-three/#flying-on-instruments" rel="nofollow">https://startupinamonth.net/month-two-week-three/#flying-on-...</a>!