In school, we typically learn how to compose an essay this way, roughly speaking:

  1. Come up with an idea
  2. Create a rough draft
  3. Evaluate it and maybe get others’ feedback
  4. Re-write it as needed
  5. Finalize it

It’s a process that can extend more generally to how we shape our lives. An example:

Main idea: you want to go to college. Rough draft: you apply, get into a college, and enroll. Evaluate: you ask yourself if you’re getting what you want out of your experience. Re-write: you change something that needs to be changed, like your major, your diet, your social circle — maybe even whether you stay at your college or continue college at all. Finalize: you move on from college, whether that’s graduating or stopping your studies.

Very common sense. But also, very hard to execute.

Because it’s easy to get stuck on the “rough draft” part. There are often many potential rough drafts, AKA choices. Potential people to go on a first date with. Potential recipes to make tonight. Potential careers to pursue.

But you just need to give one of them a chance and go from there.

As much as I understand this principle, I have often found myself wasting 10 minutes scrolling through options on Netflix, with the only result being that I have to re-heat up the food I’d just prepared to enjoy with Netflix.

There’s been much research into the psychological phenomenon of choice overload. One of the reasons for it is that understandably, people don’t want to regret their choice. They don’t want to choose the wrong person to have a relationship with and feel their time was wasted if it ends. They don’t want to train years for a job and realize they hate what they’re doing. They don’t want to buy an office chair only to see that the one their friend has includes– what, a pull-out footrest!

But that’s life. Cue Frank Sinatra.

Techniques to combat choice overload are helpful, but what I’ve needed to deal with my struggles with rough drafts and learning to accept the mess of it all was something more all-encompassing: a mindset shift.

And of all the advice that aims at creating this shift, I keep turning to a vivid metaphor drawn by Ed Sheeran.

In an interview from about a decade ago now, he talks about how creativity — in his case, songwriting — is like turning on a tap that first releases “shit water” and then later begets “clean water.” In other words, to get to the good, you have to accept the bad, or at least, the less-than-satisfactory.

So, how might we extrapolate this to apply to life in general? That our initial choices are just going to be bad? Wow, that’s not fun.

No, I think we can see it as trusting that as long as you’re producing rough drafts, clarity will come, and so will the right outcomes.

It’s easy to give up and say you won’t bother anymore after a few concluded relationships, a string of thankless jobs, a series of failed experiments or projects that never got off the ground.

But even if you don’t actively try, you will have learned from each go at things. And then as long as something still matters to you, you’ll want to give it another go. Your actions will always reveal what matters to you. (I’ve tried to give up writing and sharing my writing many times, yet here I am.)

I’m holding out for when clean water shows up again in my life because right now, things feel up in the air on a lot of fronts:

  • I hypothesize that my job is at risk of a layoff, and it’s a job I actually enjoy after having been laid off last year.
  • I am flying solo, or “self-partnered,” when it feels like a vanishing minority of my circle is in my position.
  • I’m in a good living situation, but I feel like I need a change of scenery.
  • And so on.

Sometimes, there is wisdom in just “letting things play out.” And technically, that is a choice. But it’s not the one I’m going with. I’m opting to put myself out there in job applications, in conversations with strangers, in new environments. I’m choosing to be more intentional with checking in with myself and letting my honest feelings surface, and using those as data to act upon and revise my direction.

In fact, today I had trouble writing everything you just read. I would hate something I’d just typed and let myself get distracted. But I also coaxed myself try out different ways of saying things, went from standing to sitting to lying down to hunching over like a shrimp, took a break to replenish myself with dinner, and then returned to see what should stick and what should be struck. And I plan to do it again because…

Rough drafts are never wasted efforts. They are the stuff of life.