“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.”
— Henry David Thoreau

Waiting for lightning to strike is the worst way to build something perfect. We shouldn’t wait around expecting that suddenly we’ll develop some brilliant idea, and implement it perfectly a short while thereafter. Rather, we should keep trying things, keep building things, and one day, we will discover some novel perspective, or solution. But till then, trial and error is man’s greatest friend.

In that sense, mistakes and misfires aren’t failures, but bricks laid onto the history of my work because the goal of each project is not only to build something valuable, but to help me build the next thing I build. Here, mistakes are just as helpful as success. The point isn’t to build something perfect, but to leave a trail of high-quality work that becomes better over time.

I like to imagine each thing I do as yet another brick placed on my masterpiece, my magnum opus, which will only ever be finished when I leave this world. Thus, I have no fear that something that ultimately leads to a dead end will be for nothing, for I know that it is simply another founding stone, another opportunity to glean insight into a facet of perfection, though it may never be truly achieved.