I like using wooden pencils. I like way they feel in my hand. I like the scratchy feel of lead on paper; it’s dusty and imprecise. It’s real.
When I nibble on the end, the wood dents and dimples.
I distrust the soulless mechanical monsters that spit out a thin stream of polished lead, click by click. I’m left unsatisfied by their thin, fine, precise lines.
The pencils feel heavy in my hand, the leads are fragile and snap under a firm hand.
Give me thick; give me chunky; give me a line that has some width and feeling.
I like sharpening wooden pencils. There’s satisfaction in the long, unbroken shaving; in the needle point, primed and ready for action.
When I think of a perfectionist, I think of a pencil that is always sharp.
This is wrong.
The problem with perfectionism (or being meticulous, as we like to call it) is that it suffers from tunnel vision.
We start to obsess about things that are unimportant; we optimize to the wrong set of metrics.
What’s a good pencil metric? Having a perpetually needle-point pencil feels good and it feels perfect and right, but the point is just going to snap and dull very quickly.
Whenever you sharpen a pencil, you lose lead: part of the shavings come from the graphite core. If you wear your pencil down to a stub before sharpening, you’re not losing this lead to the garbage, you’re using it on paper.
A ‘perfect’ pencil might be dull; optimizing for maximum usage might be the right way to use a pencil perfectly. Line width may be a secondary consideration.
Sometimes perfection is doing a job as quickly as possible. Sometimes it’s hitting the sweet spot of “done just well enough to not cause problems later”.
You have to be perfect along the right guidelines.