Your work can be terrible and you can be fine
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Ed Sheeran walks into every recording session and says the same thing before anyone touches an instrument.
“Dare to suck.”
He learned it from Max Martin, the Swedish producer behind more number-one hits than anyone alive. And Sheeran turned it into a daily practice. He writes dozens of songs a week. “Shape of You” was the fifth song he wrote that day. The other four were bad. He knew they’d be bad when he sat down. He wrote them anyway.
He has this analogy he uses when he talks to music students. Songwriting is like turning on an old tap in a house that’s been sitting empty. You turn it on and for the first ten minutes it just spits out dirty water. Rust, grit, gunk. You have to let it run. You can’t skip to the clean water. You have to let the bad stuff come through first, and the only way to do that is to keep the tap open.
I think about that image a lot. Most people turn on the tap, see brown water, and assume the pipes are broken. They take it personally. They think the dirty water means something about them. Sheeran sees it and thinks: good, we’re getting closer.
That’s a completely different relationship with your own work. And I’m starting to believe it’s the single biggest thing separating people who keep getting better from people who quit.
