If you’re an artist, you will need to balance between delivering good work that matches your vision, and delivering the work at the level you’re capable of delivering. 

For example, sometimes there’s just not enough time, energy, and resources to do good work. Other times, timing isn’t right—the world isn’t ready to receive a certain work, or is preoccupied with a different topic.

Will you develop and release the work, or not?

This choice can feel incredibly painful. 

An artist’s inventory of unreleased work isn’t that way because they thought it was bad, or not worth releasing. It’s because they never got the opportunity to make their work the way they wanted to make it. Work like Jodorowsky’s Dune comes to mind.

The cost of choosing not to release the work is that nobody gets to experience it; it will remain stuck in the artist’s mind. The dozens, thousands, or millions of people who could have been impacted by it will not have a chance to learn about it.

The benefit is that the artist will never have to share their work with the world and compromise on their vision (like what happened with Eddie Huang’s TV show). The work’s integrity will remain perfect in their mind and spirit. 

And nobody will ever see it.