low effort

One of the big barriers to creative output for a lot of people, myself included, is a certain degree of perfectionism: I don't necessarily want to make perfect things, or even believe that I can, but there's still a degree to which I don't want to make bad things. My own brand of perfectionism isn't usually a fear of other people seeing my subpar work, I don't really mind. It's a friction in wanting to make things at all:

To me this perfectionism manifests more like a kind of laziness; if I can't immediately imagine or achieve something awesome, I often don't begin at all. What's the point after all of putting in effort into making something if it won't be great? That's folly of course, you won't make great things if you don't practice by making mediocre things first. And if you make things to show to other people, as we so often do, other people won't judge things nearly as harshly as we do ourselves. That's my experience in everything I've ever made, anyway.

Making things with a small scope is also key to getting anything done. That's rather obvious to just about anyone who's ever tried making anything of course, but it bears repeating considering the topic here. But it's not just to keep within your means, it encourages producing more things more often, accruing the experience to make better things. And each unit of creative output can be closer to "perfection" if there's less surface area for flaws to find their way. Insert Unix philosophy here.

This post itself was written in the spirit of putting in minimal effort and just getting things out there. In this case, 'things' is my thoughts on this topic, inspired by an ongoing lack of drive to do creative work over playing video games, you get it. I've spat out words with no intent to go back and revise a paragraph until it's perfect. Not much anyway. So this post is my own means of climbing a little ways past that creative block, and filling up my archives with one more post. Let's not think too hard about my second post going up being on the topic of not posting enough...

Conclusion if there is such: Embrace the lack of effort! Make heaps of mediocrity, rather than doing nothing at all. It's a lot more fun to just do stuff. Then when inspiration strikes, really pour your soul into it.