I spent most of last week doing a job I am not qualified to do, and the result is fine. Not good. Fine. And I've had to make my peace with that in a way I didn't expect to find difficult.
Here's the situation every tiny studio ends up in. There's a piece of the project that really wants a specialist — someone who's spent years on that one thing and does it in their sleep. We don't have that person. We can't afford that person, not yet, not for this. So the job lands on whoever is closest, and that person opens a program they've never used and starts watching tutorials at half past nine at night.
The strange part isn't the difficulty. Learning is fine, learning is even quite fun. The strange part is the ego bruise. I know what good looks like in this area — I've admired it for years, I can spot it instantly. And now I'm producing something that is very obviously not it, with my own hands, and it's going into our project. There's a particular flavour of discomfort in having taste that outruns your ability. You can see exactly how far short you've fallen, in detail, which a total beginner can't.
The instinct is to keep going until it's actually good. That instinct is wrong, and expensive. Because the honest question isn't "is this as good as a professional would make it" — obviously not — it's "is this good enough to not hurt the thing." Those are completely different bars, and I wasted two days aiming at the first one before someone gently pointed at the second.
So we've started naming it out loud. This bit is a specialist's job that we're doing amateur-style, on purpose, because the alternative is not doing it at all. It's provisional. When there's money, it gets redone properly by someone who should have done it in the first place. Saying that plainly takes a surprising amount of the sting out. It stops being failure and starts being a decision.
What I didn't expect is how much I'd learn about the job by being bad at it. I'll never do this professionally, but I'll brief the eventual professional about a hundred times better than I would have last month. Fumbling through something teaches you what the questions even are.
Anyway. It's fine. Fine is doing a lot of work around here lately.
— Thiago, freshly mediocre at something new
Posted by Thiago Moreira · August 25, 2026
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