Just do.
Let’s talk about perfectionism, doubt and getting shit done.
Do or do not. There is no try.
– Yoda
So. Perfectionism, doubt and getting shit done. As an expert at two of these, I want to share some triggering nuggets I keep as reminders to help me stay on the right path.
Let's make this collaborative! Share your additional additional nuggets in the comments.
Enjoy, and send this to a friend who needs it.
Perfectionism
Let’s start with perfectionism. Ego in disguise. How many times I tweaked tiny irrelevant details of this very sentence version to finally delete it lol. Or maybe leave it? Common, let’s try another way to put it, it’s only been half an hour. A nasty disease. Exhausting.
Julia Cameron put it so well in her book The Artist's Way. This classic passage hit me so hard, it’s so definitive that we will directly move on to the next topic from there:
Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right. It has nothing to do with fixing things. It has nothing to do with standards. Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop—an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole. Instead of creating freely and allowing errors to reveal themselves later as insights, we often get mired in getting the details right. We correct our originality into a uniformity that lacks passion and spontaneity. “Do not fear mistakes,” Miles Davis told us. “There are none.”
The perfectionist fixes one line of a poem over and over—until no lines are right. The perfectionist redraws the chin line on a portrait until the paper tears. The perfectionist writes so many versions of scene one that she never gets to the rest of the play. The perfectionist writes, paints, creates with one eye on her audience. Instead of enjoying the process, the perfectionist is constantly grading the results.
The perfectionist has married the logic side of the brain. The critic reigns supreme in the perfectionist’s creative household. A brilliant descriptive prose passage is critiqued with a white-glove approach: “Mmm. What about this comma? Is this how you spell …?” For the perfectionist, there are no first drafts, rough sketches, warm-up exercises. Every draft is meant to be final, perfect, set in stone. Midway through a project, the perfectionist decides to read it all over, outline it, see where it’s going. And where is it going? Nowhere, very fast.
The perfectionist is never satisfied. The perfectionist never says, “This is pretty good. I think I’ll just keep going.” To the perfectionist, there is always room for improvement. The perfectionist calls this humility. In reality, it is egotism. It is pride that makes us want to write a perfect script, paint a perfect painting, perform a perfect audition monologue.
Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough— that we should try again. No. We should not. “A painting is never finished. It simply stops in interesting places,” said Paul Gardner. A book is never finished. But at a certain point you stop writing it and go on to the next thing. A film is never cut perfectly, but at a certain point you let go and call it done. That is a normal part of creativity—letting go. We always do the best that we can by the light we have to see by.
Doubt, fear and regrets
How many opportunities have I missed because I did not send that mail, go talk to that person, and most of all because I did not start doing?
Now, each time I feel doubt and fear coming, I remind myself:
An amazing habit to build is to
Do one thing every day that scares you.
Eleanor Roosevelt
because
He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.
– Jean-Luc Godard
and
The biggest risk of all is not taking one.
– Mellody Hobson
Another risk is to narrow our luck surface area. More on
’s moodboard for people who hate self-promotion:
It’s doing vs regrets. As Mary Oliver said:
The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
Are you still dreaming? Deadlines and schedule.
Some convincing arithmetic from James Clear’s newsletter (subscribe):
Two is twice as good as one, but one is infinitely better than zero.
One minute of making sales calls is infinitely better than zero minutes.
One minute of meditation is infinitely better than zero minutes.
One minute of writing is infinitely better than zero minutes.
Sure, it might be ideal to spend an hour doing these things, but one minute gets you in the game. Now you’re learning. Now you’re improving. Now results are possible. One doesn’t seem like much, but it’s something real. At zero, you’re still dreaming.
On deadlines, I invoke the one and only
:Always demand a deadline because it weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary. A deadline prevents you from trying to make it perfect, so you have to make it different. Different is better.
and on schedule:
If your goal does not have a schedule, it's a dream.
James Clear on “finishing”. Procrastinators and information gatherers will appreciate:
Finish something. Anything. Stop researching, planning, and preparing to do the work and just do the work. It doesn’t matter how good or how bad it is. You don’t need to set the world on fire with your first try. You just need to prove to yourself that you have what it takes to produce something.
Prototype. It's better to count your mistakes in minutes than in years.
Kevin Kelly again:
Prototype your life. Try stuff instead of making grand plans.
From the bold and inspiring OPEN SYSTEMS’s manifesto – a great read that starts like this: “Style Sucks. Leave your attitude behind.”:
Just Get Shit Done…stop talking about doing things and make them happen. Start small, scale down, make small models really fast, learn to fail faster, then scale up or scale down. It’s better to count your mistakes in minutes, then in years. Trust that others will contribute, add, modify, revise, inform, and transform what you do.
Ideas come out from the work itself.
Wise thoughts from the painter Chuck Close:
The advice I like to give anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to do an awful lot of work.
All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.
Or as… Kevin Kelly would put it (the last one I promise):
The greatest teacher is called “doing”.
Closing with Paul Graham’s solid How to Do Great Work (great read, loooong. Save it on your Instapaper):
The way to figure out what to work on is by working. If you're not sure what to work on, guess. But pick something and get going. You'll probably guess wrong some of the time, but that's fine. It's good to know about multiple things; some of the biggest discoveries come from noticing connections between different fields.
And don’t forget:
Or to put it simply:
The shortest answer is doing the thing.
- Ernest Hemingway
Thanks for your attention. Take care and have a great week ☀️