<<Hemingway rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms 39 times. When asked about how he achieved his great works, he said, “I write 99 pages of crap for every one page of masterpiece.” He has also been quoted as saying “the first draft of anything is shit.”>>
And Hemingway was right to the point. You can always recognize a great idea when you look at the bad ones.
This holds true in every area of life, but most of all in the design industry.
So, let me share with you a secret that most people ignore: ALWAYS CREATE AT LEAST TWO DRAFTS OF WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO, EACH TIME STARTING FROM SCRATCH. This way, you always have something to relate to when you make your decision.
When I first started my work as a designer for a newspaper, I was always deleting my drafts, thinking that the chief designer will laugh at me when he will see my bad drafts and that it might think that I’m not a good designer.
But later, when he only saw my finished layout he was asking me why didn’t I make it so… or so… all I could do, was to tell him that I did but it didn’t look as good as this one.
That’s when I learned a valuable lesson: it’s hard to create something great from nothing but it is possible when you put together more different not so good drafts to end up with a wonderful piece of art.
One of the best methods to create something great is to create more than one different pieces of what you have to do and then get rid of the bad ones.
All this because you’ll know what’s the best idea when you can compare it with all others bad ideas.
I was talking a few days ago with one of my mentors and he reminded me that every obstacle that we pass, take us closer to our desired goal.
It’s a true fact that we were born to succeed and not to fail. Someone, up there, wants us to succeed. All the failures we face are experiences we must learn from. And remember that all these failures make the success much more rewarding when attained.
All the great artists out there are no more talented than you and me; they all work harder and have the ability to set aside what’s bad in their work from what’s good.
And this fact holds true in every area of life.