Mistakes All the Way. An Imperfection Manifesto

01 May, 2026

Everything you do is difficult at first, but becomes easier with time.

Seems obvious, but we keep forgetting it, especially in the world we live in, where everything has to be done perfectly from the beginning and finished as soon as possible. Social media keep pressing us to do so with their success propaganda. Just look at these beautiful people and all the fantastic stuff they do, how gifted they are! It’s so easy for them, and it brings them so much joy! They definitely have something in them that makes them stand out from the crowd.

We can read between the lines: imperfection is an issue. If you do something imperfectly, you’re flawed.

It’s easy to start thinking: if they achieve something effortlessly, and I have to make such an effort, and the result is mediocre at best, there must be something wrong with me, not with the footage I watch. Dozens of such posts and videos later, those ideas that sink into one’s brain start to deeply undermine self-confidence.

What isn’t shown are hours of mastering the craft, all the failures and doubts. They’re the ugly truth that’s unpopular when all that matters is the final effect. Showing the results has the highest chance of receiving reactions, comments or whatever.

AI makes it even more difficult to focus on the foundations, on cultivating skills, on slow, but steady progress. It’s so easy and effortless to generate, well, anything; all it takes is a few moments! Efficiency, effectiveness, savings! No sweat and no mistakes that would be irreversible – all you need is a new prompt, and that’s it. You tell the machine the outcome you want, and poof, it does everything for you – quickly, easily, without any trouble. Maybe the outcome would be mediocre, but it’s all about the production, not craft.

The thing is that craft is an innate part of any human activity. We treat a shoe or a door handle as something obvious that just exists. Something is lost, though, when we separate art from craft, when we stop trying to find beauty in ordinary things and create it ourselves in everything we do.¹ There’s no art without constant self-improvement – and without mistakes. In reverse: craft needs some other goal than just doing something well enough, than achieving an okay level.

So how did it happen that we passed applied arts to machines, and now we let them take away other spheres from us as well? When did a poster become something to be quickly generated, because it’s not as important as a gain? And how about a book? Why don’t we rely on our own reason anymore when doing research or making choices, and instead delegate that to software? How much more are we willing to sacrifice in the name of money saving and efficiency? Some things were never meant to be quantified and closed in spreadsheets – they helped us to become more humane on a daily basis.

Making art doesn’t become more accessible thanks to AI. A generated image is not created by you, the same as a text ghostwritten by a chatbot. You don’t develop any skill or as a person by using artificial intelligence, and no, it’s not a tool like a pencil or a brush. Art has always been accessible: you need only something that leaves a trace and some surface to start drawing, similar to writing or painting.

Nothing is easy at first, though, and that’s how it’s supposed to be.

With time and practice, not only you gain skills, but you also start to change yourself. With each mistake, you learn how not to repeat it in the future. By gaining knowledge, skills and losing your path, you learn where you should go and where not. When you fall, you learn what’s possible and how to make possible something that seemed to be impossible.

As Brandon Sanderson said, the most important change when creating art is the one that happens inside of you.²

You’re a piece of art, similarly to something that you create.

AI doesn’t give you space for mistakes, for arguments, for discussion. It tells you anything you want to hear, not what you need. Constant praise might be the deadliest poison an artist might take.

People behind AI want to convince you that now everyone can be an artist, that something that was never meant to be easy and pleasant (because obstacles are part of a process) can become such. They take away from you failure, artistic and personal development, space for mistakes, and experiencing how to be a human. Art doesn’t become more accessible; AI feeds you with illusions, but for the price of time you could spend learning an actual skill instead of wasting it on ‘prompt engineering’. A machine doesn’t help you by doing things on your behalf. It keeps you in the same place.

When you use AI, you become a visitor in a process you should own; you delegate something that’s worth being done by yourself; an observer of something that should enrich and develop you.

Enough with this AI bullshit.

Make mistakes, fall down and get up, experience doubt, throw something at a wall, argue with others for what you create. This is art, and that’s what makes the outcome meaningful. Your path matters, not what you show in a photo. Life doesn’t have to be effective or optimized – when it’s tangled and when you make mistakes, that’s when it becomes truly yours.