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ANY JOB WORTH DOING
September 27, 2007
 
I'm an easy person, but since I reinstalled everything on my computer there have been just too many notifications of secret lovers who are dying to meet me, too many Cyrillic invitations to try medicines that will increase the size of an organ I do not possess. I resolved to get a new security program. And I did.

You can download these things from the comfort of your own home, still in your nightgown. But it still takes a little while, and you can't always work alongside it.. When I began it, I had almost two hours to write an eMo -- the perfect amount of time. After all the restarts and updates, though, I now have 45 minutes until I must be dressed and on the train.

Ah, well. This is as good a time as any to note that the old saying about any job worth doing is worth doing well should not always be taken literally. There are many things worth doing that don't have to be perfect. If there is no time to do a perfect job, you may have to do a good-enough job, a best-you-can-in-the-time-you-have job. Sometimes good enough is just going to have to be good enough. You can't do better than the best you can do in the time you have.

I look at my old books and articles -- a word here would be better left out, I see, and here is a sentence that could have been worded differently, to its advantage. I see something new every time I reread, and I guess I always will. All of them are tissues of error, really; not a single one of them has been perfect. But they got done and they got out there, and no reader has yet died from their imperfections.

Get it as done as you can and get it out there. If you have the luxury of time, savor it -- there is no greater gift. But if you do not, don't think that you cannot create. Many have taken the gift of time and turned it into a curse: they tinker and tweak for years, and their work never sees the light of day. Never. They die with it all still in a drawer.

They are frightened of the world's reception of an imperfect work. We all are. But here is a hint: they're all imperfect. And here is another one: the world barely notices anyway.
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