Every polished thing you admire was once a rough idea someone decided not to throw away.

You only ever meet finished work, which makes it look like it arrived that way. Behind it sits a rough early version that looked unpromising and nearly got deleted, and the real difference between that one and the ones that vanished is that somebody kept going. Measuring your draft against someone else’s final version is a comparison with the entire middle removed.

Keep the ugly early version of whatever you are making rather than deleting it. Put it somewhere safe. Next time a rough start makes you wince, go and look at what the last one became.