Make No Excuses (in spite of Dunning-Kruger)

Being insecure and self critical about one's own work is part of most artist's life. Especially when you are rather inexperienced you might feel like your work might not be up to professional standards.

Probably every composer remembers the feeling they had when you are just starting out to  set foot into the world of writing music and realizing that you really know nothing at all.

Looking back at my own musical development, I was perfectly following the Dunning-Kruger curve. If you're not familiar with the concept of this effect: people with little knowledge of a subject overestimate their abilities and fall into a deep valley of despair shortly after that as soon as they realize what they don't know while people with more knowledge often underestimate their abilities.

The graph below demonstrates it very well:

When I first "decided" to become a film composer and write music like John Williams and all the others, in my youthful naivety I remember that I thought it really can't be that hard to do that. This phase lasted for about half a year before I realized that I really had no damn clue about what I was doing. When I fell into the valley of despair it really lasted for several years even into my professional career. 

So almost everybody needs to go through this valley but also many professionals believe that what they're doing is "nothing special" in spite of it requiring years of experience.

However, in the professional world, no matter where on the graph you are (hopefully past Mt. Stupid), there is one essential thing to always remember which is to not make excuses for your work.

Your own personal struggles should not play a role in your professional communication. You often might be tempted to find excuses for your work that you might not be happy with.  Things like "If I had more time on this, I could make it much better." or "If I had more money to buy sample library X, this would be much better" or "If a real orchestra was playing this, it would sound much better." Even if these points may be true, your client doesn't care about these things but only about results. If you put something out there, you need to have the courage to let it stand on its own without you making excuses for it.

The essential thing to realise and be aware of is that your own assessment of your abilities very often is not accurate. Things that you are extremely critical about in your work might not play a role at all in the "big picture". Developing a sense for this and what is important and what isn't is part of the experience that you gain over the years.