Why I am often so very secretive about my works-in-progress:

(This is mainly about my life-hacks at home. However, it applies to some of my artistic works too.)

So… I am someone who gets a lot of “weird ideas that actually work.”

This is definitely not all of my ideas– a lot of my weird ideas fail catastrophically!

But, because I get so many weird ideas and am willing to try them… I end up doing a lot of things that, when others see them, they go OMG THAT IS BRILLIANT YOU ARE A GENIUS WHY HAVE NONE OF US EVER THOUGHT OF THAT BEFORE

But. This only happens when people see my successful finished product.

When people just hear my idea, or see it in progress, their reaction is almost always something like “WTF that’s the worst idea ever, ridiculous waste of time, how could you possibly imagine that would ever work?”

And this is NOT ONLY because my ideas grow and improve as I work on them, although that’s part of it.

It’s also just that…. my ideas are WEIRD. And complex.

So people seeing them unfinished are both

1. not getting the full picture of HOW I intend for them to work

and

2. often too overwhelmed by the weirdness to even CONSIDER the possible functionality.

So this is why I’ve found it very counterproductive to show people my ideas before they are completely done.

Because even if someone thinks they’re contributing valuable advice… even if they COULD maybe have valuable advice if they really understood the project….

…in practice, the dialogue is much more often just “me exhaustedly trying to correct an endless list of wrong assumptions about what I am even trying to do, and how, and why.”

I’d rather focus on doing the actual work.

If it fails, you’ll never see it, and if it succeeds, you’ll call me a genius, and that’ll be a lot more painless for us both, okay?