perfect art is about to become worthless

Most artists chase perfectionism, but perfect art is about to become the cheapest art. And when that happens, the flaws in your work will be worth way more than any skill you have, and I'll prove it to you. My name is Waay, and I spent the last few years studying how hundreds of the most creative people in history created their best art. From poets, painters, musicians, filmmakers, and trust me, there's a shift happening, and very soon, perfectionism will be the easiest thing to make. And when perfectionism becomes common, presence becomes rare. We won't be searching for better work, we'll be searching for proof that someone created it. I want to share five ideas on perfectionism that I share with a lot of artists whenever I talk to them about their work, in hopes that it helps you make more honest work that will actually reach your core audience in a time like this. All right, let's get started. So, the first idea is at the core of it all. Our mistakes might be the only part of our work that proves we were here. A perfect circle shows us a circle, but a hand-drawn circle shows us a person trying to make one. One gives us the shape, the other gives us the moment. That wobble in the shape of the line, it's not separate from the work. That wobble is where humanity enters the work. A machine can make the same line again and again and again, but the hand, it can't. The hand, it might be tired today. It might be brave another day. The hand, it could be rushing, it could be scared. Maybe it presses harder when it cares. Marks on a canvas. It holds all of this. A line is s- is never just a line. It's a record of a body moving through time. And that's why handwritten notes can feel more intimate than the same words perfectly typed. The message is not only in the words. The pressure of the pen is a part of the sentence. The uneven spacing between the words are part of the emotion. The rushed letter show urgency. The crossed-out letters show truth. And sometimes the mistake is simply not a flaw. Sometimes the mistake is the signature of the artist. Perfection shows us what was made, but imperfection it shows us that someone made it. All right. So, the second idea is actually the point where perfection is and become dangerous. There's a point in the creative process where fixing the work starts erasing the person who made it. We clean up the work so that people can see the idea, but then we keep cleaning it because we're scared that they might see us inside of the work, too. We remove the pause, and then we remove the breath, and then the strange word, and then the rough edge, and then we eventually get to the part that makes the work ours, and we erase that, too. And soon nothing is wrong with the work, but nothing is alive, either. The song, it might be clean. It might be a sharper painting, a sentence, yet the person behind it is gone. The artist is gone. We thought we were helping the work speak, but we're actually teaching it to hide. Life is not perfectly smooth. Nature it doesn't repeat itself perfectly. No two flames hold the same shape. No wave reaches the shore the same way. No tree grows with one branch and then copies it. Life repeats, yes, but life does not copy. That is why tiny changes in your work can feel so alive. A note that bends, a voice that shakes, a brushstroke that gets thinner as the paint runs out. These marks wake us up. They tell the body that something living is here. Perfect work it will earn praise, but living work earns trust, and trust trust is going to be one of the most valuable currencies of the next few years. By the way, if you want all my notes on creativity from the last few years studying creativity, every insight, every inspiring idea, just tap the link in the description and tell me where to send them. Okay, so this next idea is something that most artists don't even notice about their own process. The first sketch often knows something that the final piece forgets. You see, the first sketch it's still searching, while the final piece has its mind made up. Like the first sketch shows the question and the final piece shows the answer. And answers can impress us. But questions, they they draw us closer. That's why an artist's notebook can feel more alive than the finished work. We see the bad lines, the lost ideas, the shape that almost became something else. We'll see the artist change their mind. We them find the work before they even know what it is. The finished piece it might say, "Here's where I chose." But the rough notes, they say, "Here's how hard it was to choose." And man, that's why showing the process behind your work is not just marketing. It's the the the that trail, it might actually be a part of the art. Right now as I'm making this video, the artists ready again in Latin Mafia are live streaming on YouTube and making of their mixtape. They started from scratch. And they're not leaving that live stream inside of that studio until they're done. Right now, I think they're more than 2 days into the live stream and creation of this project, meaning that they've been sleeping in the studio and continuing the live stream. But the beautiful part is that the live stream is a part of the art. We're able to witness the parts of the creative process where it's dead and dull, but also where the sparks of inspiration were born. Without the rough work, the final piece can feel like magic. It can look like it fell from the sky. But art doesn't fall from the sky. It's pulled from doubt, shaped through wrong turns. It's found one mark at a time. The rough mark, it doesn't weaken the finished work. It gives the finished work a past. Okay, so this next idea is actually kind of trippy, but follow me here. You don't create the thing. You create your relationship to the thing. As in, if you give 10 people the same chair and you ask them to draw it, you actually won't get 10 chairs. You would get 10 ways of seeing. One person might draw the weight. One person draws the like empty space under it. One draws comfort, while one might draw loneliness. The chair, it stays the same, but the people do not. And that's the secret inside every mark. We don't show the world as it is, we show the world after it touches us. Generating an image of a chair can show you where a chair is, but the person can show what the chair meant. And this is why the imperfect mark matters. It carries the shape of attention. It shows not only what we saw, but also shows how we saw it. Now for the last idea, and this is probably the most important one because it can potentially change how you create forever. When anything can be generated, devotion becomes more impressive than production. Caring becomes rare. We are gaining the ability to create more images, more songs, more ideas than any person can ever consume. Abundance doesn't remove value. It actually just relocates it. When an image was difficult to produce, the image itself it proved effort. Now, a finished-looking result may have taken 6 months or 6 seconds. So, the surface it no longer tells us the sacrifice that was made. So, we begin searching beneath the surface. Not only what was made, but why. Why Why does someone keep returning to this idea? Why do they notice what everybody didn't? Why did they let themselves be naked in this way? The future may not belong to the people who can produce the most. It might belong to the people whose care is visible in their work. Because care is texture. Care notices what speed misses. Care puts a detail in a piece that didn't even need to be there. That's what I mean when I say the value is no longer production. The value is devotion. We thought the hand mattered because it could make something. But now machines can make, too. So, we're forced to look deeper. The hand doesn't just carry out the idea. The hand leaves its mark on reality. It says the work did not simply appear. A human reached. something pushed back, but humanity stayed. It left its mark. Our job might not be to make every mark perfect. Our job might be to learn which marks are mistakes and which marks are proof of life. Because in a world full of perfect things, the mark that moves us most might be the one that says that there was a person here. A person that cared and they left the evidence as a door for everyone to enter. If these ideas resonate with you, then I think you'll also be interested in what we're building at World of Creatives. It's one of the rare places online where there's artists and writers and musicians and filmmakers from all around the world getting together to share our creative process and the strange ideas and the work before the world even understands it. And sometimes the difference between abandoning your creative potential and growing into it is being surrounded by people who can see the life in your work and support your vision. If you made it this far into this video and something felt less like advice and more like recognition, I think this might be for you. I'll leave a link to apply to the World of Creatives Collective in the description below. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video.