Early drafts of great work are encouraging

I get so encouraged looking at early drafts of great work, thinking, “I can do that!”

In this clip from “Le mystère Picasso”, you watch Picasso start with a simple scribble of a goat, then flesh it out. Not only adding textures, but changing his mind and removing things as well.

After making the brilliant movie Sin City, director Robert Rodriguez was cool enough to include the entire film as it was really shot on a green screen.

The Beatles’ “Anthology” had some great outtakes and early versions of songs I thought of as untouchably perfect. Like seeing stars without makeup, you realize how much of the magic is in the finishing touches.

Archive.org’s wonderful Wayback Machine lets us see:

• yahoo.com from 1996
• cdbaby.com from 1998
• google.com from 1998
• myspace.com from 2003
• and facebook.com from 2005 when it was still called “The Facebook”.

I meet so many potential entrepreneurs who think they have to spend millions and months in development before launching. (And therefore, they often never launch.)

For the first nine months of CD Baby, every page was hand-coded HTML and the site did nothing but email the order details to me. I had to copy-and-paste all the info from each email into four places: a mailing label, a thank-you email, a vendor-alert email, and a Filemaker database. It was as lo-fi as can be, but it was enough to get started, and it was profitable.

So I’m writing this in hopes that we get more of these “Version 0.1” stories out there. Encouraging potential entrepreneurs, songwriters, artists, and inventors to compare themselves to the early drafts, not the final polished perfection.