MVP | Why we humans always make barely passable stuff?

Minimum Viable Product

"A product with just enough features to satisfy early customers..." ^{- source}

Basically it means making something that barely passes for what people might wanna look at. While this term originates from the technosphere, I think it does apply to almost any aspect of life. A high school student who wrote an essay with just enough words to hit the 400 word minimum, a college student who wrote her dissertation that is just thick enough to qualify for one. An office worker who filed just enough paperwork for the day to look okay in front of the boss. A writer who writes a decent enough read for the day.

We've been there.

The Path of Least Resistance?

It is known that lightning will strike in places where there is least resistance to conductivity.

It might sound like slacking to just come up with something when we know we could have done better. What good does something do when you as a maker knows that you can make it better? I know you have that feelings sometimes too. That Steem post that is 3 paragraph long and 1 picture, barely 10% of what you usually do. Would it even do any good?

I've struggled with this for quite some time. I always have tried to not even post anything until i have something that i thought "people would like". I mean, I can very easily churn 2 post a day with bare content to pass as a "content creator" and have my follower's feed by filled with my stuff. Would i want that? passing up (perceived) quality for quantity?

But after many moons of ruminating on the issue and looking at writers that i looked up to, I noticed something...

It's okay to MVP

Not every single stuff we create has to be our Magnum Opus, for every Starry Night that Van Gogh has drawn, he probably made about a hundred other simple (by his standards) commissions that took him maybe less than 30 minutes per piece to paint. Man's gotta eat, right?

_{The Starry Night by Van Gogh, Everyone seems to wanna make something like in their first try right?
| Source : Wikimedia Commons}

I always thought that only those who are "up there" has the authority to come up with 2-3 paragraph article to fill in the days where their real good stuff did not come up.

But as I look at their stuff deeper and more and more way, damn... these people has been doing that since before they were even blips in the radar.

MVP posts are acceptable when you are striving for consistency.

Content creation is a volumes game. It's all about the numbers and the practice and lessons you gained as you pump those numbers. To be good, we need to do the same thing day in and day out. It's called grinding, your first 100 posts will be crappy, face it. Your first 1000 post might still not be up to par. But by the time you've been practicing your writing skills, your vocab, your research skills, the way you tell your story in your distinct way, and wrote your first 10,000 article, you might not realized how far you've come from your beginning.

Dave Grohl in his famous rant said that "Musicians should go to a yard sale and buy an old f****** drum set and get in their garage and just suck. And get their friends to come in and they'll suck, too. And then they'll f******* start playing and they'll have the best time they've ever had in their lives and then all of a sudden they'll become Nirvana. Because that's exactly what happened with Nirvana."

Just Suck.

that means coming up with stuff that is not your Magnum Opus.. Because you are striving for consistency.

Everything has a v0.1. Don't be ashamed to post that lousy article you made yourself that doesn't compare to the people you look up to.

I'm struggling with this myself too, I'm majorly aware of that.. Which is why I wanna put this out to not just encourage you guys, but more importantly, serves as a reminder for myself.