Doing bad things

Starting tomorrow, I'm going to do really bad things, daily. Not morally bad, just artistically bad.

For some time now, I've been blessed with a stream of new, exciting ideas that I really want to explore, ideas that more or less divert from my previous work. And I've tried exploring them, too. Problem is, since it's new territory, the ideas often don't turn out very good when I start working with them. And so I get discouraged, start to doubt, and either I abandon the whole thing or I try to 'save' the result by reverting to old, proven methods, playing it safe, and ultimately ending up with something that isn't at all what I wanted to explore, but an uninteresting, safe result that is nothing but a testament to my own cowardice.

The thing is, we must crawl before we walk, everyone knows that. But as accomplished, adult beings we don't like the idea of going back to crawling -- our egos won't allow us to, so we play it safe and stick to what we know, saving face but failing to develop. Children, always the fastest developing people ever, do not care; they have no other choice but to crawl, stumble, fall, do things badly, because they have nothing 'safe' to revert to and nothing to lose. And so they do things badly, over and over again, until one day, they do them really well.

So I've realized that what I have to do if I really want to explore these new ideas is to push my ego aside and really do things badly in the beginning. I think and hope that it'll be easier if I make my mind up and decide to really, really do very very bad stuff the next couple of months. Daily. In fact, as I've done before with stimulating results, I'm going to start a secret little blog where I post my daily piece of bad work, just to have a framework and a little something to motivate me to stick to it daily. But I won't tell you the address to my secret blog, because I'm still scared.