Finish on a miss

Have no fear of perfection — you’ll never reach it. —Salvador Dali 

Over many years I’ve realized that growing up a perfectionist was not only about having a serious desire to do things at a high level, but it was also, and maybe even more so, a fear of failure.

Like many people, when I realized I was a perfectionist, I thought, or maybe just convinced myself, that even though it was very painful for me, it was a good trait to have.

When I was younger I thought it was going to help me be a good athlete, and as I got older and started working, I thought it was good attribute to have as a designer. I’ve come to realize that that was not, and is not the case…

Instead, it starts dictating your decisions, and you unknowingly, or maybe knowingly, start playing it safe, because it feels better to keep a ‘perfect record’ so to speak.

I grew up playing all types of sports; around 6th grade is when my obsession shifted from baseball to basketball. I absolutely loved it and obsessed over it; I would play and practice constantly. Even then, I sort of realized there was something wrong. I would show up to the gym about 3 or 4 hours before a game to try and make sure my shot, my ball handling, even my legs felt perfect. Oh, and this was in 6th grade.

This wasn’t playing anymore, this had become more of a mental workout. I was anxious and stressing out about a Saturday morning game with 6th graders… And of course this didn’t get better with age, by the time I was playing in high school I would do the same thing, except now I would shoot for as long as I could before the game, and since I never felt perfect, I would call my parents right before the game and beg them not to come to the game.

I remember during halftime of a game when I was a freshman, our coach told/yelled at the whole team that I was the only person on the team that can shoot any time I want, he then looked at me and said, ‘I want you to shoot every single time you get the ball.’ Imagine how amazing that would feel to someone that wasn’t afraid of missing a shot! I wish I had heard, and believed this quote back then,

“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” Michael Jordan

The reality of course, was that my shot never felt perfect. Not before, during, or after a game, so I would barely shoot when it actually mattered; during the game! As you can imagine I felt like crap after every game. I would beat myself up constantly about it, and this is supposed to be fun, right?

Of course, I was acting like this with everything, not just basketball. My mom tells me when I was really young I would start drawing on a piece of paper and if I didn’t like how I drew the first line, I would crumple up the paper and throw it away. Fast forward 20 years or so; as a designer at Landor I was re-designing Gatorade. My design had been chosen as the new design. Even though my design was already chosen, I remember continuing to work more than 24 hours straight just tweaking the logo. Print-outs where piling up under my desk, just like they probably were when I was a kid. The funny (well, sorta funny) thing is that no one but me could see the difference between any of the designs. I ended up missing a deadline to get the files out to the client. I got in a lot of trouble for that, and I’m really glad I did, because for me, that was the moment I realized how counter-productive being a perfectionist was.

The perfection of art is to conceal art. Quintilian

It sounds weird, but I’m really glad I was pretty extreme about being a perfectionist; it became disruptive enough that I recognized it, and was able to address it. As I wrote about in a previous post, if it was only a little bit disruptive, I may have never recognized the need to deal with it.

Here’s why I called this post ‘Finish On a Miss’

When I would practice shooting back in the day I would have to finish by making myself hit several shots in a row. If I was shooting 3-pointers I would keep going until I hit at least 5 in a row, if the shots were inside the 3 point line I would keep going until I hit 10 in a row, and if I was working on my form very close to the hoop I would hit 10 shots in a row, and they all had to be swishes.

I don’t play pickup or in leagues any more because of a herniated disc, but when I shoot around, I often stop shooting after a miss. It’s a small thing, and it’s not about basketball any more, but I try to do little things like that here and there just to keep from slipping back into that old way of thinking and acting.

I’ll be hitting ‘publish’ on this post, even though I know it’s a bit rough and want to tweak it further, just as a little reminder to myself, that it’s better to ship/launch/share stuff at 80% than it is to share nothing at 100%

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Every single thing teaches you something, but no single thing teaches you everything.