3 entries in the Commonplace Book
It can help if you focus less on where you are and more on the rate of change. You won’t worry so much about doing bad work if you can see it improving. Obviously the faster it improves, the easier this is. So when you start something new, it’s good if you can spend a lot of time on it. That’s another advantage of being young: you tend to have bigger blocks of time.
Another common trick is to start by considering new work to be of a different, less exacting type. To start a painting saying that it’s just a sketch, or a new piece of software saying that it’s just a quick hack. Then you judge your initial results by a lower standard. Once the project is rolling you can sneakily convert it to something more.
The right way to deal with new ideas is to treat them as a challenge to your imagination — not just to have lower standards, but to switch polarity entirely, from listing the reasons an idea won’t work to trying to think of ways it could.