I'm always surprised to find out that even great writers were skeptical of their masterpieces. I wonder if it is false humility, or genuine lack of self efficacy
I think behind almost every successful endeavor (no matter the scale) you'll find someone driven by personal dissatisfaction with their work. For example I think most good software comes from people who go to bed a little concerned about issues with their code or product features. On the more grand scale, when Michael Jackson released Thriller, the first album I believe to outsell the Beatles, all those around him thought his next album should be just a simple collection of covers so he could take a break, but he was determined to out do it, dissatisfied with his current success (which would seem absurd even to most HNers, you just outsold the Beatles, you can give yourself a pat on the back)
Success is the balance of dissatisfaction with your own work combined with a drive to push forward. The drive without the dissatisfaction just leads to a bunch of mediocre half done projects, the dissatisfaction without the drive will just end in depression.
I think truly great people are nearly torn apart by these clashing drives, but that's what leads to true masterpieces.
On a personal note I think it's important to find the level of dissatisfaction that works best for you. It my be great to make Thriller, but paradoxically if you're the person that makes Thriller you won't be able to accept its greatness. At the same time you never want to be in a state of comfort such that your life is spent playing xbox all day. Of course some (Buddhists being one group) would argue that true happiness is elimination of both the drive and the dissatisfaction, they may be right but I'm too driven in my personal work to follow that path ;)
> On the more grand scale, when Michael Jackson released Thriller, the first album I believe to outsell the Beatles, all those around him thought his next album should be just a simple collection of covers so he could take a break, but he was determined to out do it, dissatisfied with his current success
It's unclear whether you're talking about Thriller itself or about Bad, but Thriller was definitely driven by dissatisfaction with himself (he was extremely lonely according to his bios) and with the world at large: Jackson was frustrated by Off The Wall not having gotten Album of the Year (and felt it was unfair), and he was annoyed that the music industry and its press did not care about black people in general and him in particular (e.g. in 1980 Rolling Stone refused to do a cover story on him).
I was intrigued to learn that Tony Kaye went virtually mad during the production and writing of American History X, arguably one of the top ten movies of the last 100 years, and was so dissatisfied with the end result that he attempted to disown the film entirely, even going so far as to try to use a pseudonym (the undying `Alan Smithee' and, later, 'Humpty Dumpty') just to keep from being tied to the movie.
I think you would find the same phenomenon in any creative endeavor, be it writing or composing or coding. A work on any medium is an imperfect representation of how it exists in our minds, and any creator with the degree of perfectionism required to produce a great work would surely be dissatisfied with the result of any attempt to bring it to fruition.
How many times have you finished a program but known it could be better, if only you had more time? A little optimization here, some refactoring there... The necessities of producing actual works prevent us from ever giving them the degree of polish we feel they deserve.
Others have pointed out the phenomenon, but I like this concrete illustration of it in action.
Slashdot once interviewed The Filthy Critic, and he talked about a friend who had spent time in the writing rooms of a few sitcoms. The writers working on shows that were really pretty poor thought their work was hilarious. They couldn't get enough of their own jokes. He contrasted it with The Simpsons's writing room: full of frustrated, self-loathing writers who didn't think what they were doing was any good at all.
I read this quote yesterday on Bret Victor's site, it very nicely fits "I am not pleased with the book but I am not absolutely dissatisfied"
"The trick is to realize that there's no real contradiction here. You want to be optimistic and skeptical about two different things. You have to be optimistic about the possibility of solving the problem, but skeptical about the value of whatever solution you've got so far.
People who do good work often think that whatever they're working on is no good. Others see what they've done and are full of wonder, but the creator is full of worry. This pattern is no coincidence: it is the worry that made the work good.
If you can keep hope and worry balanced, they will drive a project forward the same way your two legs drive a bicycle forward. In the first phase of the two-cycle innovation engine, you work furiously on some problem, inspired by your confidence that you'll be able to solve it. In the second phase, you look at what you've done in the cold light of morning, and see all its flaws very clearly. But as long as your critical spirit doesn't outweigh your hope, you'll be able to look at your admittedly incomplete system, and think, how hard can it be to get the rest of the way?, thereby continuing the cycle."
