Perfectionism and Fear of Success

[IdleRich]

I went round my friend Pedro's house to make a tune. He has loads of equipment making one room of their house into a studio bristling with synths and fx boxes and so on, all plugged into some version of Ableton.


View attachment 17096

Thing is, I had a bit of a feeling that he's too much of a perfectionist, one of those guys who spends three days getting the hi-hat sound in the fade out exactly right while forgetting to make the tune any good.

But I've started to wonder if he just has an actual fear of success. He's often told me that when he was young he used to play with these guys who are now big names, he claimed he just got bored of the straight up techno that they were doing and chose to walk away from a life of fame, drugs, money and adulation because he refused to make music he didn't believe in. I'd always taken that with a pinch of salt, but the other day he showed me all these videos of his mates playing to enormous crowds and messages from them saying "Pedro you twat, come back and play with us and make some money" so who knows...

He says he gave up on techno when someone asked him to make them an EP and he experimented by just turning on a basic four four beat and then spending five mins adding a few shitty noises and some half-arsed fx etc on top. He sent it back to the guy who had asked for it and, not really much to his surprise at all, he got a response saying "Sick! Amazing choons man!" and that was the final straw for him. In other words people were seemingly impressed by him just doing the most basic four-four tune with no effort or originality and he took that as confirmation that the whole scene was tasteless idiots spinning bland nonsense to morons who would never notice how rubbish it was. Anyway, I've no idea about when that was supposed to have happened, or how reasonable his conclusions were...

... however, I do know that recently (last couple of months) he made a album with this guy here in Lisbon and a DJ from NY was keen to release it. Do people know this bloke Curses? I dunno if he is well known but he's a DJ who put out some pretty cool synth/dark techno comps and I guess he puts out new stuff too on his own label. Liza has a comp he put out with about forty tracks on it, and I'd say that it's a good comp in that it has a load of stuff in a genre that is pretty well dug over, and yet he's found forty tracks that are unknown and good. So the fact that he wanted to release the stuff that Tadas and Pedro were working on was pretty exciting. And they worked hard on it and completed the record, and they gave it to Curses and he said "Cool this is just what I wanted, I'm definitely gonna put this out" and then suddenly at the last minute Pedro said "Ah, you know what, I'm not happy with this" and he just blocked the release.

It seems to me that there is a definite pattern going on here, of almost self-hindrance . I just don't get why he wouldn't put this record out with Curses, like even if he wasn't totally happy it would still be a sort of marker of an achievement and something to remind him of where he was and what he was doing at a certain time. He could also compare later releases to it and see if he had improved. The work was done, the record was ready to go... why not just put it out? I guess he would have got some money too. I just don't get it at all... I'm also surprised that Tadas wasn't more annoyed with him as well what with being the other half of the band. But is it just me? Does that make any sense to any of you?

As well as that Pedro makes a load of songs for himself, he said that he often makes a new track for every DJ gig he plays... and so you'd think he should have a library of unreleased floor-burners, and at least some of them ought to be pretty good right? Except he deletes them all after he's played them. And that makes me really wonder if he's afraid of having a permanent record of anything he's done.

 

[IdleRich]

Well that's in music, but it doesn't have to be music. It reminds me a little bit of a former flatmate of mine. When he moved in with me he was keen to put out an anthology of pomes that had been written by a guy form his home town of Portsmouth - the author was a friend of his and he had recently died so, yeah I get it, he wanted to do a good introduction for him at the start of the book. So my friend wrote a little introduction for the book, about a page or two of stuff about this guy's life. It took him about half an hour to come up with something pretty decent. And then after that, he tinkered with it, he tinkered and tinkered and tinkered and tinkered. I reckon that he just kept fucking around with it for about five years, he changed somewhere in the region of one word every week. Many of which no-doubt got changed back of course.

And this same guy he made a video for a friend... nice tune, nice enough video I guess. Concept was that he got a load of pairs of sunglasses and put them on thousands of pedestrians in central London and then he just filmed it. Central London, random people wearing sunglasses, that's it.



But once it was made he edited it. He changed when the cuts happened and he changed which scene came after which and for how long and so on.

So I suppose it took about an hour to buy the sunglasses, maybe a couple of hours to give them to people on the street and film them. And there after that it took maybe half an hour to cut it together, maybe four hours total from absolutely nothing to a completed video. Completed apart from re-editing that is. But when he edited it he played the song again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.... must have been billions of times in a row. It was just maddening. He just did it non-stop from the time of his return from central London at, let's say, 4pm on a Sunday and then for the next six months solidly, just restarting it the second it finished. Making minor changes each time. Changes that no-one would possibly notice, changes that he often changed back later.

I dunno if he maybe paused to get a bit of kip sometimes when I was at work or something, but as far as I can tell he did nothing whatsoever but continuously edit that video for months on end. And I don't think a casual viewer would be able to tell any difference between the first version and the latest one. To me it began to feel as though he had a serious mental illness, especially when he finally completed it and sent it off to the guy... and then about ten minutes later he went "Oh my God no!" and then he sent an email titled URGENT DO NOT USE and he was desperately phoning the guy again and again trying to get hold of him immediately so he could prevent the incomplete version going on line, leaving countless messages saying "EMERGENCY that's not the right version, do not put it online, I need to change it" until he finally caught the guy and he calmly said "sure" and promised that he wouldn't put it online and that he would wait for my friend to send him the official, finished version.

Ironically there are several links to the video on YouTube and of course while I assume that there is one, I don't know which version of the video is the "correct ultra-final ready to go" one and I don't know if all of the available links are the same, and I don't care either, and no-one does. The big shame for me is that at first I really liked that song, there's a space in my heart for proper left field pop music like that, stuff that anyone could tap their toe to but which is quirky enough that when you listen to it properly and dig under the big shiny chorus you realise that there is something weird going on, be it some surreal and subservive lyrics or something else. But of course that song was ruined for me, I experienced it in the same way as an Iraqi POW being forced to hear Ace of Spades a million times in a row

 

[IdleRich]

But what I'm wondering is, why does this happen? What is it that makes it people edit like this? Of course, anyone who has ever made any music or whatever is probably familiar with that "Oh shit why didn't I...?" that hits them as soon sa they go to bed, that's just natural, I'm talking about the extreme examples who do that again and again and again with the most minute changes on top of the most minute changes....

Is it a fear of failure... or a self-sabotaging fear of success? Or perhaps it's not quite either of those, I start to wonder if there is a simple fear of fixing the thing... of having to declare a final version which can no longer be changed. And then that makes me wonder if this kind of approach can also be seen, more generally, in life as a whole. There are so many people who fear specialising in one field. They go to school, do GCSEs and A-levels (if they in the UK) and then a degree that is non-vocational ie English or History or whatever* and then after they graduate they tend to stick around in various temping jobs rather than actually choosing a field where they have to specify and narrow down and which they can't immediately transfer from to another. There is definitely a notable section of people who are so afraid of permanently closing any doors that they refuse to open any of them... and they run the risk of realising one day that it's too late to open one.

This fear of commitment in life is very common. I suspect that I am just one of many dissensians that it could apply to... but is it recognised in music? Is it common for people to fear declaring a version of a track Thee Final one? I reckon that it's maybe there quite often in the back of the mind, but for most can be overcome with a bit of rational thinking - people can always do their own remixes at home, even the released form is not an actual irrevocable final thing - see the amount of directors's cuts we get in film. Often with DVDs you get a load of extras which it's easy to see as cynical cash-in type things or just rubbish to fill up the dvd, but I can easily believe that lots of directors would be very happy for there to be a few other slightly different versions of some of their films out there. And so the people above who ultimately were almost incapable of putting out a final version are surely extreme examples... oh and one thing I should say just in case it's not obvious, I reckon tha in those cases all their hours and hours of extra work added almost nothing in terms of quality to the product being worked on... maybe that is not obvious and did need to be said, I guess there are some people who are really good at editing and improve things like this, but, sadly, I don't think that the Venn diagram of people with that ability overlaps hugely with the group of people who spend lots of extra time editing.



*I'm not in any way criticising these degrees, I'm just saying that they are quite different in that respect from say a medical degree which I suppose means that you will be a doctor (or nurse?) or even if you do engineering, it's not quite as specific as that but it represents a narrowing down.

 

[Clinamenic]

My god Rich

 

[craner]

Just say no.

 

[IdleRich]

I'm lost...

 

[mixed_biscuits]

As well as that Pedro makes a load of songs for himself, he said that he often makes a new track for every DJ gig he plays... and so you'd think he should have a library of unreleased floor-burners, and at least some of them ought to be pretty good right? Except he deletes them all after he's played them. And that makes me really wonder if he's afraid of having a permanent record of anything he's done.

And yet he doesn't delete the artist with whom he collaborates.

Can't you be his Milli Vanilli and be the face for his Curses release?

 

[mixed_biscuits]

My specialism is setting myself a target of producing n things where n is large but mysteriously completely running out of steam at the n-1th or n-2th thing.

 

[IdleRich]

And yet he doesn't delete the artist with whom he collaborates.

Can't you be his Milli Vanilli and be the face for his Curses release?

I dunno if he's really collaborated before. He did the thing with Tadas that didn't come out, but I dunno what happened to the actual music.

 

[sus]

A related thing I've noticed is fear of being tested. People who have a very precious image of themselves and of the art they make and are therefore unable to finish any of it, because finishing it would be admitting the actual object doesn't live up to the ideal.

 

[IdleRich]

A related thing I've noticed is fear of being tested. People who have a very precious image of themselves and of the art they make and are therefore unable to finish any of it, because finishing it would be admitting the actual object doesn't live up to the ideal.

That's what I'm getting at, they daren't ever test the potential that they can always claim to have.

 

[IdleRich]

And this same guy he made a video for a friend... nice tune, nice enough video I guess. Concept was that he got a load of pairs of sunglasses and put them on thousands of pedestrians in central London and then he just filmed it. Central London, random people wearing sunglasses, that's it.



But once it was made he edited it. He changed when the cuts happened and he changed which scene came after which and for how long and so on.

So I suppose it took about an hour to buy the sunglasses, maybe a couple of hours to give them to people on the street and film them. And there after that it took maybe half an hour to cut it together, maybe four hours total from absolutely nothing to a completed video. Completed apart from re-editing that is. But when he edited it he played the song again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.... must have been billions of times in a row. It was just maddening. He just did it non-stop from the time of his return from central London at, let's say, 4pm on a Sunday and then for the next six months solidly, just restarting it the second it finished. Making minor changes each time. Changes that no-one would possibly notice, changes that he often changed back later.

I dunno if he maybe paused to get a bit of kip sometimes when I was at work or something, but as far as I can tell he did nothing whatsoever but continuously edit that video for months on end. And I don't think a casual viewer would be able to tell any difference between the first version and the latest one. To me it began to feel as though he had a serious mental illness, especially when he finally completed it and sent it off to the guy... and then about ten minutes later he went "Oh my God no!" and then he sent an email titled URGENT DO NOT USE and he was desperately phoning the guy again and again trying to get hold of him immediately so he could prevent the incomplete version going on line, leaving countless messages saying "EMERGENCY that's not the right version, do not put it online, I need to change it" until he finally caught the guy and he calmly said "sure" and promised that he wouldn't put it online and that he would wait for my friend to send him the official, finished version.

Ironically there are several links to the video on YouTube and of course while I assume that there is one, I don't know which version of the video is the "correct ultra-final ready to go" one and I don't know if all of the available links are the same, and I don't care either, and no-one does. The big shame for me is that at first I really liked that song, there's a space in my heart for proper left field pop music like that, stuff that anyone could tap their toe to but which is quirky enough that when you listen to it properly and dig under the big shiny chorus you realise that there is something weird going on, be it some surreal and subservive lyrics or something else. But of course that song was ruined for me, I experienced it in the same way as an Iraqi POW being forced to hear Ace of Spades a million times in a row

ps that guy Mulato Pintado is (or was) the singer for Paranoid London.

 

[sus]

You break up with them to make sure they never break up with you

 

[sus]

Eighty twenty Pareto rule also seems like it gets inverted in these scenarios people end up spending all their time on diminishing returns

 

[wild greens]

In 2018-2019 I had a bit of a morbid run and ended up reading a few posthumously published books in a row; a few ragged Hemingway ones (though i do love Islands In The Stream), Gaddis "Agape Agape," which i thought was uniformly awful though it is an experiment I think, Fitzgerald's "The Last Tycoon" etc. There were quite a few in the end.

I can understand the school of thought where those emotionally or fiscally attached to the author believes the world should be the recipient of these lost works, completion of lineage etc, but once you strip the emotional attachment out a lot of them were completely shit, so i can understand the methodology of not releasing a work to the world. Is all of this you refer to "perfectionism" or is it simply someone knowing what they've done isn't good enough. I wrote a book when i was twenty about doing loads of coke and club nihilism but i read it again last year and it was shite, i would hate for that being out there with my name attached.

I haven't read it but there is a Nabakov book he was writing when he died that he wanted destroying but then the executor released anyway in a final cash grab. Maybe your mate has the fear of posthumous digital bandcamp obscurity; a pointless fate really

In the case of the lad up there with the sunglasses video, that sounds a lot like mental illness to me, but what is the difference between a habitual editor to someone addicted to wanking or a cashpig or even these lads who have big trombone vapes and enter smoke ring competitions, the brain loves to find fruitless dopamine loops and get you stuck in them, the process is the reward and all that.

Why am i even writing this, you know what i mean, but it is good to get words out, keep yourself ticking over. It's all work

 

[wild greens]

Maybe the antithesis to this are those twitter accounts with millions and millions of tweets, the bizarre abundance of it is maybe art in itself but equally you are just losing yourself to the ether, there is a Japanese one with 38m tweets (Venethis) and most of them are just splatoon screengrabs I think?

There was an
article in 2016 that talks about this and looking at it today there are five or six of the top ten that are either deleted or suspended, or some have withdrawn but kept private archive e.g. https://twitter.com/octifx

That always stuck in my mind. Millions of tweets. There was a girl adjacent to an old London scene who we knew & she must have had 80k tweets in 2011? That terrified me

I guess the ephemera is the opposite to whatever you were on about initially

 

[IdleRich]

Is all of this you refer to "perfectionism" or is it simply someone knowing what they've done isn't good enough. I wrote a book when i was twenty about doing loads of coke and club nihilism but i read it again last year and it was shite, i would hate for that being out there with my name attached.

When I started the thread I was kinda throwing it open just to see what people thought of when I said "perfectionism" although the aspect in my mind was specifically people I know who are seemingly unable to stop tinkering and call something finished. While the possibility exists that they can change it ie improve it ie perfect it, they cannot let go of it in its imperfect form. A paralysis caused by the desire for perfection.

I guess that's the origin of that saying "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good".

 

[IdleRich]

Maybe the antithesis to this are those twitter accounts with millions and millions of tweets, the bizarre abundance of it is maybe art in itself but equally you are just losing yourself to the ether, there is a Japanese one with 38m tweets (Venethis) and most of them are just splatoon screengrabs I think?

There was an
article in 2016 that talks about this and looking at it today there are five or six of the top ten that are either deleted or suspended, or some have withdrawn but kept private archive e.g. https://twitter.com/octifx

That always stuck in my mind. Millions of tweets. There was a girl adjacent to an old London scene who we knew & she must have had 80k tweets in 2011? That terrified me

I guess the ephemera is the opposite to whatever you were on about initially

It's only tangentially related but this reminds me of guy who was in the news a few years back. He was on trial for possessing indecent images of children and his defence was something along the lines of "Yes, my hard drive does contain 10,000 images that are illegal child porn, however they represent less than a tenth of a percent of my vast library of hundreds of millions of pornographic images".

I'm not sure where it went from there. I dunno if he was simply claiming that he did not know what he had and could not be expected to maintain the purity of such an enormous library of grot, or if there was more to his argument.

Certainly for me the story raised all kinds of questions about the nature of collecting and ownership - do you own something if you can't lay your hands on it? Is it a collection if you haven't curated it? And beyond that it suddenly hit me that simply by being too big to properly conceptualise, things on this kind of scale force us to rethink definitions and basic rules.

And other random things come to mind here.... when growing up it suddenly hit me that as a record collection grew and the time remaining in which to listen to it shrank, inevitably must come a point where one cannot listen to one's entire collect - so what is the point? And in fact with a book collection the moment will arrive even sooner.

Such a sad intimation of mortality - the young enthusiast sets out excitedly "ooh now I've got a hundred CDs but of course it's a mere droplet in the ocean of musical possibilities that stretches away from me in every direction further than the eye can see" - there is simply no conception of the notion that one day this formerly limitless expanse will be cruelly restricted by the inevitable crushing march of time - if of course jaded experience hasn't built its own more personal boundaries first.

 

[version]

Nassim Taleb has that bit about Umberto Eco's "antilibrary",

“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”

 

[wild greens]

Is that lad who made The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly in his garage a perfectionist or is he just mental

I am not even remotely replying to the original bit sorry

I love this antilibrary bit, reminds me a lot of all the books my Mrs buys but never reads