The Perfection of Imperfection
In Martin Scorsese’s film “Casino”, there is a scene with Robert De Niro and Sharon Stone. Ginger McKenna (Stone) is crying on the bed and Ace Rothstein (De Niro) is trying to console her. It’s a very intimate moment between the two characters with a great performance by Stone.
I later learned from an episode of “Dinner for Five” (I highly recommend watching the show, Jon Favreau is a *great* interviewer) that there was a camera bump right in the middle of the scene! Why did a great filmmaker like Martin Scorsese let a mistake like that get into his movie?
It was on purpose. He knew there was a camera bump, but he thought Sharon Stone did such a great job on that take that he let the performance be the deciding factor in editing the scene and not the technical details of filmmaking. This fact has stuck with me for a long time because it reminds me that when you are doing creative work, whether it be a film, music, writing, or whatever medium you choose, it is the raw truth of what you are trying to communicate that matters in the end. If you can somehow capture that “lightning in a bottle”, make someone feel it deep down in their soul, all mistakes and imperfections will be overlooked and forgiven.
It is easy to get lost in the minute details and let that become the focus, it’s part of the craftsmanship of the work you are doing. But the focus should be on the story you are trying to tell and the reason why people should care about what you have created. It’s a balance I’m still working on, constantly reminding myself not to lose sight of the bigger picture, but it’s hard because those tiny details really do bother me and get under my skin.
But the other half of the creative effort is to just to keep creating. I’ve noticed that the successful filmmakers, musicians, and writers are the ones that have an incredible body of work both published and unpublished. You can’t get better without practice and if those imperfections bother you too much, you can get stuck in a never ending task of trying to fix every last one of those mistakes and never get to creating your next piece of work. You will create some stinkers, but if you keep creating long enough, you will create some masterpieces. I think people often stop creating because they run out of ideas and I think that is part of the genius of great artists, they somehow keep coming up with new ideas. Sometimes they need to journey into the wilderness to restart that creative fire, but they find a way to do it because they can’t help themselves and it’s part of their core being to create.
For me, this not only applies to my writing or other creative endeavors, but it also applies to my work in building products. It’s a hard journey trying to build a product and even harder journey to build a successful product that people love, but it’s something that I can’t seem to stop doing or at least keep trying to do. I’m still working towards building my next successful product, but I know what it looks like and I’ll keep creating and building until I finally get it right.
