How to Judge the Value of Your Creative Work

How do you know if your work is any good?

When I was just starting up my blog and podcast, I’d have cold sweats and heart palpitations every time I hit the publish button. Okay, not gonna lie I still do sometimes. The question that looms large in your mind when you’re putting your work out in the world, regardless of whether you’re new at it or not, is, “How do I know if this is any good?” And while we’re asking, how do you know it’s good enough to dedicate time to producing it in the first place? Creative work requires a lot of time, time that in all likelihood you’ve taken away from something else. How do you justify that, unless you’re actually producing something of value?

Most creatives and artists cycle through extremes when it comes to their feelings about their work. One day they’re imagining all the accolades they’ll receive, the next they’re questioning all their life choices as they stare despondently at the crap they’ve just brought into the world. It’s notoriously difficult to accurately judge your own work. Nonetheless, it is possible to come to a stable assessment of it. I’m going to give you some realistic parameters of evaluation that are anchored in the nature of the creative process itself.

Why is it important to use the creative process as your basis of evaluation? Because if you try to judge your work based on either your own feelings about it or other people’s opinions, you will continue to be stuck in that cycle of extremes. While I do think it’s important to find value in your own work that’s rooted in your enjoyment of doing it, that’s not a good way to judge its value to the world. And relying on other people’s judgements is pure folly: a good review puts you on top of the world, a bad one sends you crashing down. It’s exhausting to live that way.

A much better way to judge your creative output is by your capacity to actually do the work. Producing creative work takes persistence and patience. That’s it. Your relative talent isn’t very important, because if you continue to do the work, your skills will increase as a byproduct of that process. You won’t even have to try that hard to improve: the human brain is wired to seek challenge and learning. As long as you continue to feel motivated by your work (learn how to maintain motivation in this post), improvement will happen.

The relative excellence of your work is a moving target. Because creative work is about process, the value of your output is found in its improvement over time, not how good it is in any given moment. You must have a long view when it comes to judging your work. It doesn’t matter how “good” any particular piece of it is; it’s in the regular accumulation of your work that its value is found.

Take for example Seth Godin, a well-known thought leader in matters of entrepreneurship and creativity. His work is of high value, at least based on traditional measures: he’s popular and he makes money. But Seth Godin isn’t saying anything other people couldn’t say. In fact, many other people are saying similar things. What Seth Godin does is put a lot of work out into the world without worrying too much about whether it’s “good”: currently he writes a blog post a day. He has ideas, and he writes about them and puts his words out there. He keeps doing (and shipping) his work.

I’m not saying that value equals fame and fortune. Most of us will never have either. Seth Godin is simply a well-known example of the value of process. In fact, on the very day I’m writing this his blog post is about the incremental improvement comprising process. I’m willing to bet that Seth Godin judges his own work primarily based on the fact that he did it yesterday, is doing it today, and will do it again tomorrow, and that it will evolve over time in accordance with what inspires him.

That’s creative process.

When you begin to see your work as an evolving body rather than discrete outputs, you’ll begin to find value in the creative process itself and your dedication to it. Your attachment to specific outcomes will lesson, and you’ll worry less about what other people think. Everything is experimentation, a work in progress. Don’t be too precious about your work. Just keep doing it.