The Curse of Perfectionism and How to Beat It
I remember my first time in a real recording studio.
A good friend from college had made a bunch of demos of songs he had written, and reserved a couple weeks in a studio to record them.
He asked me and a bunch of his other friends he used to play in bands with to come up with parts for the songs, and come in to record them.
It was a pretty awesome setup. I had never been in a “real” recording studio before, let alone recorded in one. Most of the recording’s I’d made were with a guitar and a 4-track in my bedroom in high school, or with an 8-track in a clumsily mic’d up room with college bands. But this place was fancy, with a decked out control room, tons of guitars and amps to choose from for each song, and an engineer who knew how to lead the whole process.
And the music sounded great.
Every day for that week, I’d go home listening to rough cuts of my bass and guitar tracks as the songs came together.
At first I was excited.
But the more I listened, the more I started to notice flaws.
Was the bass loud enough?
Did that one part interfere with the drums?
Was I being too busy distracting from the vocal parts?
The more I listened, the less sure I was.
And at the end of the whole process, when we sat listening to the final mix, I just thought to myself, man, I don’t know. I had heard it all so much, it became like mush in my brain. I really couldn’t tell if it sounded good.
Luckily, I didn’t have to.
There were enough professionals in the room who could make the decision.
And that’s a good thing, because if it were up to me, I probably would have kept us in there for an extra week or two, just tinkering endlessly, trying to make it perfect. And in that process, I probably would have ruined it.
That’s the curse of perfectionism.
It’s like the ultimate version of analysis paralysis.
That’s not just because it’s hard to make things perfect — it’s impossible. At a certain point, you have to say, okay, it’s done, and move on.
For a lot of people, though, their perfectionism is so strong, they never get started in the first place.
The only way to break through it is to embrace imperfection.
Realize that nothing is ever going to be perfect.
And it doesn’t need to be for you to move forward and get what you want.
But it’s like most inner blocks:
You can’t just wish perfectionism away.
It’s not just a mental habit.
It’s rooted in the deep, chronic neuromuscular tension that keeps your brain anxious.
To free yourself from it, you have to release that tension, and liberate the confidence and decisiveness trapped within it.
Learn how here:
