Can You Get Better Doing a Bad Job?

Rick Rubin has an interview with Woody Harrelson on his podcast Tetragrammaton. Right at the beginning Woody talks about his experience acting and how he’s had roles that did’t turn out very well. He says sometimes he comes away from those experiences feeling dirty, like “I never connected to that, it never resonated, and now I feel like I sold myself...Why did I do that?!”

Then Rick asks him: even in those cases, do you feel like you got better at your craft because you did your job? Woody’s response:

I think when you do your job badly you never really get better at your craft.

Seems relevant to making websites.

I’ve built websites on technology stacks I knew didn’t feel fit for their context and Woody’s experience rings true. You just don’t feel right, like a little voice that says, “You knew that wasn’t going to turn out very good. Why did you do that??”

I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say I didn’t get better because of it. Experience is a hard teacher. Perhaps, from a technical standpoint, my skillset didn’t get any better. But from an experiential standpoint, my judgement got better. I learned to avoid (or try to re-structure) work that’s being carried out in a way that doesn’t align with its own purpose and essence.

Granted, that kind of alignment is difficult. If it makes you feel any better, even Woody admits this is not an easy thing to do:

I would think after all this time, surely I’m not going to be doing stuff I’m not proud of. Or be a part of something I’m not proud of. But damn...it still happens.