Bret Victor in his fantastic [Inventing on Principle talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII) spoke about his belief that creators need an immediate connection to what they create. Quick feedback cycles: you change something, and the system responds. You create by reacting, one step at a time. And this is what artists often do, as he describes in this paragraph in his [Learnable Programming](https://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/) article: > ##### Create by reacting: start somewhere, then sculpt > > I was recently watching an artist friend begin a painting, and I asked him what a particular shape on the canvas was going to be. He said that he wasn't sure yet; he was just "pushing paint around on the canvas", reacting to and getting inspired by the forms that emerged. Likewise, most musicians don't compose entire melodies in their head and then write them down; instead, they noodle around on a instrument for a while, playing with patterns and reacting to what they hear, adjusting and sculpting. An essential aspect of a painter's canvas and a musical instrument is the immediacy with which the artist gets _something there_ to react to. A canvas or sketchbook serves as an "external imagination", where an artist can grow an idea from birth to maturity by continuously _reacting to what's in front of him_. I read this paragraph in Oliver Pourriol's, _The French Art of Not Trying Too Hard_: > Writing isn’t about producing one perfect sentence after another, but about correcting your first, imperfect sentence in the one that follows, and so on. What really matters when you’re building a wall isn’t the first stone, but the ones that follow, which interlock, as far as possible, and end up between them forming a wall along with that first stone. Continue. Keep moving forward, don’t look back. The exercise of writing without crossing out seems difficult until you try it. You don’t believe you’re entitled to make mistakes; you think you’ll be paralyzed by the idea that you can’t go back. In fact, the opposite happens as soon as you accept that you don’t have to be perfect. You just have to lean on the imperfection of your first sentence to make the next one emerge. You’re freed from the anxiety of always having the possibility of retracing your steps. There is something liberating about the irrevocable. Don’t get me wrong. No one’s asking you to be perfect—just act as though you are. Suspend judgment on what you’ve done and free yourself from it by moving forward. Flow is born from presence, and effort often inhibits it. As my housemate once mentioned, don't try to work, just work. What if you chose to build one imperfect prototype after another, without being crippled by the need to get it right?