It’s amazing how your opinion on your work can change over just a little bit of time.
I spent some time yesterday looking over some of my shorts on my Youtube channel, just a couple of weird animations and experiments really, but I found myself really being proud. I liked them. The question of whether or not they were any good didn’t really come to mind It didn’t matter. I was just happy to see some completed things.
Is that the reward for hard work? The pride that you feel way down the line when you look back on what you’ve done?
But then there’s the engagement that I felt when I worked on them. I can recall the time that I spent on each of them, the level of focus and the feeling of flow that I really had. Those were good feelings too.
But then there’s the in between. When the project is “done” and you’ve separated yourself from it and you look at it with disgust. It just didn’t turn out right.
That’s the worst part. That’s the curse. The unhappiness and uselessness that you feel upon finding yourself at the end. It didn’t reach your expectations, so you feel like a failure.
So you have to wait a couple of years just to feel that sense of pride? To get to the next good part?
How can you fill that gap? Especially at the beginning when the pattern of work and reflection hasn’t quite settled, when you don’t have enough behind you to look at with pride?
What do you do in the meantime?