The Benefits of Building Badly

PRACTICAL TOOLS

I've always been a person who wants to do things myself. I fancy I can turn my hand to many things. They may not always have the polish that a craftsman would achieve, but neither are they that bad. Over the years I've saved a small fortune, but that's not my primary motive, and neither is perfection.

Okay, not everything has gone that well. It's trial and error. But the badly built thing is doing more useful psychological work than the well-built one, and the men who insist on getting everything right the first time are, without realising it, depriving themselves of one of the more valuable experiences.

Mindsets and spirit levels

The psychologist Carol Dweck's research on mindset draws a distinction between two broad ways people relate to their own ability. A fixed mindset treats ability as a stable trait: you either have it or you don't, and any evidence of failure is evidence you don't. A growth mindset treats ability as something that develops through effort and, crucially, through getting things wrong along the way.

Men, in my experience, arrive at DIY and hobby projects with a fixed mindset rather more often than they'd admit. Competence is deeply tied up with male self-worth, and the man who attempts a project and produces something visibly imperfect experiences this not as "I am still learning how to do this" but as "I have discovered that I cannot do this", which is a rather more damning and rather less accurate conclusion.

The growth mindset framing turns the wonky chair leg into data rather than a verdict. It didn't tell you that you're incapable. It told you, specifically, that your measuring needs work, that you really can't do all DIY jobs with a saw and a hammer. That certain tools and time watching a few YouTube videos can be enormously informative.

Building badly is helpful

Research on skill acquisition consistently finds that errors, properly attended to, are more informative than successes. A project that goes right the first time gives you exactly one data point: that particular approach worked, under those particular conditions. A project that goes wrong gives you more in terms of where the error occurred, why it occurred, what the actual cause was as opposed to what you assumed the cause would be, and what needs to change next time. The clumsy first attempt is not a failed version of the good outcome. It's a diagnostic tool that the good outcome, arriving too easily, simply doesn't provide.

This connects directly to my article on why men who fix things are onto something psychologically, which made the case that diagnostic thinking (working out why something doesn't work) engages a genuinely demanding and genuinely satisfying form of cognition. Building something badly and then working out why it's bad is, in effect, giving yourself a diagnostic puzzle deliberately, on purpose, as a byproduct of simply having a go. You don't get that puzzle if the first attempt is flawless. You get it, reliably and usefully, if it isn't.

The perfectionism trap

The article on the psychology of shame in men made the case that perfectionism is frequently not a mark of high standards but a shame-avoidance strategy: a way of never attempting anything you might fail at, dressed up as caring about quality. This shows up with particular clarity in hobby and DIY contexts, where the stakes are genuinely low, and the perfectionism is, correspondingly, entirely disproportionate to what's actually at risk.

The man who won't attempt a shelving project because he's not confident it'll come out well is not protecting himself from a serious consequence. Nobody is depending on this shelf. Nobody's safety is at risk. The entire cost of failure is a mildly wonky object. And yet the perfectionist instinct treats this negligible-stakes situation with the same avoidant caution it would apply to something genuinely consequential, which tells you something useful about how disproportionate the underlying anxiety actually is, once you see it operating in a context this low-risk.

This is precisely why hobby projects are such a good training ground for tolerating imperfection more broadly. If you can't handle a wonky shelf without spiralling into self-criticism, the chances of handling a genuinely difficult professional setback with equanimity are not good. Practising imperfection somewhere the cost is a few pounds of pine is considerably cheaper than practising it for the first time when the cost is your career.

The wonky shelf is not evidence that you can't build shelves. It's evidence that you've started building shelves. Those are very different pieces of information, and only one of them is actually true.

Who cares whether it worked?

The neuroscientist Kelly Lambert's research, covered in the fixing-things article, established that the brain's effort-driven rewards system responds to sustained physical effort producing a tangible, visible result — and that this response fires largely independent of whether the result is objectively good. The circuit is rewarding the doing, not grading the outcome against a professional standard.

This matters enormously for anyone who's talked themselves out of a project on the grounds that they "probably won't be any good at it." The psychological benefit — the sense of competence, the tangible evidence of effort, the specific tired satisfaction of a day spent making something — is available whether the shelf comes out straight or at a slight, characterful lean. You are not required to be good at this for it to be doing you good. You're simply required to have a go, and to have finished the thing, badly or otherwise.

The social permission problem

Men are, broadly, given considerably more social permission to be competent than to be visibly learning. A man confidently assembling a bookshelf draws no particular attention. A man clearly struggling with the same bookshelf, consulting the instructions repeatedly, occasionally swearing at a dowel that won't seat properly, is performing something the culture around masculine competence doesn't especially reward — public, visible incompetence, en route to eventual improvement.

This is worth pushing back against, because restricting yourself only to things you're already reasonably confident of succeeding at produces a life that gradually narrows. The article on why success feels empty at 42 made a related point about status-seeking behaviour producing diminishing returns; the same logic applies here. A man who only ever attempts things he's already good at accumulates a great deal of competent repetition and very little genuine growth, because growth, by definition, requires a period of visible, uncomfortable incompetence that the confidently-assembling version of masculinity has very little tolerance for.

Knowing your limits

Having a go and accepting imperfection is excellent advice for a shelf but less good for, say, electrical wiring, gas fittings, or anything load-bearing in a structural sense. The value of building something badly depends entirely on the actual, real-world cost of the badness. A badly wired plug socket carries a cost that a badly built birdhouse simply doesn't.

The useful distinction is between genuinely low-stakes imperfection: cosmetic, easily corrected, harmless to anyone, including yourself and imperfection with real consequences.

What am I saying?

Pick something with genuinely low stakes and have a proper go at it, expecting it to be imperfect. Not as a lowered standard, but as an accurate prediction. First attempts at most skills are imperfect, and treating that as a given rather than a personal failure changes the entire emotional experience of the project.

Keep the first attempt, at least for a while, rather than immediately disposing of the evidence. The instinct to hide or bin a poorly executed project is understandable and, on the evidence above, slightly counterproductive. The wonky shelf, left in place, is a genuinely useful and genuinely cheap reminder that competence builds over attempts rather than arriving fully formed.

Notice what went wrong, rather than simply noting that it did. This is the diagnostic step that converts a failed attempt into learning. The general feeling of "that didn't come out right" is far less useful than the specific observation "the cut was two millimetres short because I measured from the wrong edge" — and the second version is the one that actually improves the next attempt.

Do it again. The value described throughout this article compounds with repetition. The second shelf is better than the first. The third is better again. None of this requires talent. It requires a tolerance for the badly built version long enough to get past it.

I once tried to glue parts of an engine together. You may laugh, but I learned that engines and glue are incompatible; then I tried again.