A corollary to this I include in my life is "Do your worst." I get stuck a lot creatively: this feature I'm building is too hard, this design in my head is too vague, my article idea sucks, my video isn't going to make sense, etc. What helps me break through that, is just put the crappiest version out on the page. No edits. Radical self-acceptance of whatever I put on the screen. Often the whole thing gets a huge refactor. Yesterday's architecture document I was working on started this way and I ended up throwing the entire first version out. But that crappy first version totally unblocked me to get something I'm now proud of.
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I like this quote from Ira Glass:
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me.
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it's like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you're making stuff, what you're making isn't so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.
Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn't as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.
And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you're going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you're going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you're making will be as good as your ambitions.
I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.
—Ira Glass
One of the best phrases I've ever heard: "Shitty First Draft":
https://wrd.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/1-Shitty%20First%...
I completely agree. Another heuristic which has helped me in research (and I owe to my supervisor) is to break the problem down to the simplest set of elements which mimic the problem or mechanism or physics of whatever needs to be solved. This helps me stop panicking.
I saw one HNer refer to this as a "vomit draft".