good enough isn't good enough

Norman Foster is an architect. As I writer, I see architects as our closest creative kindred spirits (it's no accident I named my company Bookitect). Authors, like architects, have to design something much too big, complicated, and interconnected to completely envision before putting pencil to paper.

An artist can imagine something and sketch it as envisioned. A musician can hear a melody in their mind and then play it. But neither architects nor authors can fit an entire building or book inside their heads at once. That means they must carefully develop and refine the process they use for going back and forth between their ideas and their works-in-progress. That challenge is at the heart of writing and the focus of many of my essays.

Back to Foster. If you aren't familiar with the man, his firm, Foster + Partners, or his iconic buildings—from London's Gherkin to Berlin's Reichstag Dome, you've certainly seen an Apple Store. That's Foster's signature style: "an architecture of orderliness and long sight lines," as described in an excellent New Yorker profile.

Read the whole article, but here's what struck me: A former colleague said Foster would “always push you beyond where you thought you needed to go.” If I had to name one trait separating great artists from good ones, it's this.

Let's be honest: creating is exhausting. As many say, I hate writing but I love having written. Tackling something big and difficult—a short story, a chapter—is like solving a math problem. You've got X words to address problems A, B, and C. Work long enough, and you'll succeed. Eventually, A, B, and C are handled and you're under X words.

That's where most of us stop—with a sigh of relief.

Then there are the Fosters of the world. As Ian Parker explains in the New Yorker:

Foster understood that a good time for a radical revision (if not the most prudent time, economically) might be long after everyone had settled on a scheme. By that point, a team of architects is fully immersed in a project’s constraints and possibilities. “That’s a good time to throw everything away and start again,” Shuttleworth said.

This is how you go from good to great. And believe me, I know—it sucks. It's exhausting, frustrating, and makes me want to tear out what little hair I have left. But every time I've worked with someone who says, Yes, it works, but now that we fully understand the problem, let's try something different, the end result has been better.

This is not the same thing as circling the drain, a topic for another essay. A Foster-like only works when you first understand why the current version succeeds. You have to know it's good enough—and why—before reaching for something better. Without judgement and discernment, you're just impossible to please.