The merits of making terrible art, and accepting it

I have a lot of stories I want to tell, and I find that paradoxically the more I want to tell a story the less likely it is that I'll actually make it. I think every artist or film maker has a project or story they've wanted to make since a young age, their 'magnum opus', I know I do. But the trouble is I assign such great value to these projects that actually making the damn thing becomes an impossible, mammoth task which I will never consider myself good enough to do justice in my mind, because this is my perfect idea that's been brewing in my mind for years, it has to be great! So I end up just doing little designs and writing story arcs that I know aren't perfect so I put them aside for when I have the technical skill to improve them, but that's where the problem lies, being an artist is always progress and never perfection. So seeing these projects as the best I can possibly do naturally means that I'll never actually do it because I am always in a state of learning and improving. So I guess that's why I haven't actually made my best selling epic 500 page sci-fi graphic novel that I've been writing since I was 14.

My point is that worrying that I can always make something better is stopping me from making anything at all, I only seem to be productive when I let go of the idea that the quality of the final product is a reflection of me as a person, or artist. It's better to accept that anything I make will be imperfect, but it's better to have something finished, because even if I make something at what I consider the peak of my abilities after even a week I'll look back and see glaring errors. So for me this is where the value of experimenting, having fun, not worrying about the end result and just making SOMETHING. In the same way as a kid I would just slam paints onto the page and have a whale of a time and not spend 4 months trying to craft an insightful subtext. I think what I consider to be my best animations exemplify this, they are the stories I want to tell in their purest forms, from my mind to paper, even if they aren't really any good they say something about me.

Obviously I'm not saying that taking on ambitious projects is a bad thing, I still want to make these stories I've been holding onto my whole life, but for now I gain a whole load more from animating a dumb joke at 3am, because it's finished.