Journal · On Creativity
The Tyranny of Better
On perfectionism, and the courage to commit to one idea.
There is always something better. A more beautiful phrase, a cleverer fill, a composition with more depth than the one in front of you. This is true, and it is the most dangerous truth a musician can know. Because the moment you believe it, you start to wait. You hold the idea you have at arm’s length, certain a better one is coming, and you keep your hands open for it instead of closing them around what you already have.
I have watched gifted players spend years in that waiting. They begin a composition and abandon it. They start a solo and second-guess it before the second bar. They have taste, they have ideas, they have technique — and they release almost nothing. Sometimes nothing at all. We call this perfectionism, as if it were a virtue, a sign of high standards. It is not. Perfectionism is not a standard. It is a refusal to decide.
Perfectionism is not a high standard. It is the endless search for a better idea — and it is why so much music never gets made.
Creativity does not begin with the idea. It begins with the decision to stay. To take one idea — not the best one, not the final one, simply the one that came — and commit to it. To develop it, turn it, follow it where it wants to go, and finish it. The choosing and the staying are the whole creative act. Everything good comes after the choice, never before it.
You see this most clearly when you improvise. An idea arrives — a small rhythmic phrase, nothing remarkable. In that instant you have two paths. You can take it, trust it, and build on it. Or you can drop it and reach for the next one, and the next, forever chasing the phrase that will finally be good enough. The player who commits makes music. The one who keeps searching makes a string of beginnings that never become anything. The idea was never the problem. The leaving was.
Think of writing a poem. You cannot write about every subject in the world, all the beauty there is, in a single poem. If you try, you write nothing. You choose one small thing — a window, a hand, a single morning — and you give it everything you have. That narrowing is not a loss. It is the whole beauty of the form. And tomorrow you are free to write another poem, about something else entirely. The poem in front of you is not your only chance to say everything. It is permission to say one thing well.
This is not a theory for me. Fifteen years ago I made myself a promise: I would never teach the same composition twice. Every private student, every lesson — beginner or advanced — gets a piece I compose for them, then and there. It means that week after week I sit down and have to bring a new drum composition into the world, sometimes in ten minutes, and record it before the lesson moves on. There is no time to wait for the better idea. There is no second draft to hide behind. I make a choice, I commit to it, I shape it, and it is done.
I made that promise to serve my students. But it did something to me I did not expect. It took perfectionism off the table entirely. When you must create on the spot, again and again, the endless search for the better version simply has nowhere to live. The work became easier — immediate, almost ordinary. Not because my standards fell, but because I stopped confusing standards with hesitation. The composition that exists, recorded and handed over, is worth more than the perfect one still circling in my head.
There is always something more beautiful around the corner. The musician who waits for it arrives at silence.
None of this is an argument against care. Refine your work. Hold it to a high bar. But refinement happens to a thing that exists — you cannot polish a decision you never made. First you commit. First you finish. The better idea you are waiting for is not on its way. It only arrives after you have made the first one real, and usually it arrives as the next piece, the next solo, tomorrow’s poem.
So make the choice in front of you. Stay with it long enough to find out what it is. Let it be imperfect — it will be, and that is fine. The musicians who move us are not the ones with the most beautiful ideas. They are the ones who were brave enough to finish.
Choose one idea, and give it everything. Tomorrow there is another.
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