Throw away your work - by Vân - Van's Newsletter

If someone gives me a coin for every time I throw away my work this year, it would be enough to fill the Trevi fountain in Rome. It’s not easy to throw away labor, but it’s necessary to do anything well. Throwing away work is scary, because it feels like we wasted time and labor. But even more emotionally taxing, it triggers ugly self-beliefs. It exposes the vast gap between our ambition and our skill. Each scrapped out piece of work piles onto our mountain of insecurities, until we’re little ants, planted at its feet, staring up at the overwhelming height. We write a paragraph and the words too shallow for the idea we want to express. We draft a report and the data pieces awkwardly into fragmented compilations instead of a consistent whole. In the struggles of the process, we lose trust midway, and settle for the clumsy first versions of our work. We don’t believe we can deliver something stronger. The learning curve feels too steep. There are too many paths and not enough clarity on

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