work / motivation

SECOND DRAFTS

I’m not a second-draft kind of girl. In most of my schoolwork, I put all of my effort and time into my first draft, then never went back to refine it. I was content with whatever grade I received, even when it wasn’t the best, because putting in the extra effort necessary to close the gap to excellence didn’t seem worth it. “An 89 percent is close enough to an A,” I would tell myself, avoiding doing more work. But what I was really avoiding was the painful fear that maybe I wasn’t good enough, maybe I wasn’t perfect.

Let me explain. If I got a B+, but I didn’t actually try that hard, having only done one draft, then I could still say I was doing fine. But if I had tried harder, tried my best to refine my work, only to find I still got a B+, then what could I say to myself? I would be a failure.

Doing the work is difficult. Going back to the second draft is tough, because it means admitting that we are not perfect, that we could have done better. It took me almost thirty years of living to accept this insanely obvious truth: No one is perfect. Absolutely no one, including me, and including you.

We never get it exactly right on the first try. We all need second drafts, and sometimes third and fourth and fifth drafts, because we all benefit from giving ourselves the space to improve.