Add ‘Good Enough’ To Your Vocabulary
Perfectionism is killing your creativity.
There’s an awful lot of competition out there for content creators. She makes awesome videos. He should be landing a book deal any day now. Did you see their dance moves? How do they come up with content every single day?
When we talk about social media, the conversation usually turns to the evils of it, how it brings out feelings of inferiority, FOMO, and jealousy. An optimist or two will point out the aspirational side of social media and how we’re able to share now more than ever before: wonder, amusement, and education are all right at our fingertips! Everyone can get in on it!
Many try to get in on it or at least talk about trying. I’m in that same boat, having left my 9–5 to pursue a more creative, more fulfilling line of work through freelance writing. I thought it’d be easy enough, with all day to devote to the craft and all the comforts of my home around me. But I didn’t anticipate just how precious I’d get about putting myself out there alongside writers and creators I admire. I didn’t take into account the security blanket of perfectionism.
And wow, was it killing my creativity.
You see, perfectionism sounds like a good thing initially. Why wouldn’t you want to put your best foot forward, have all your ducks in a row, and every other ‘preparation’ idiom conceivable before your launch? One more masterclass, one more consultation, one more how-to article…they start adding up and eating into our most precious resource: time. And when time is getting spent without anything to show for it, that’s called procrastination.
“Now hang on,” you may be thinking, “learning isn’t a waste of time.”
You’re absolutely right about that. But what I’m talking about is perfecting, which is nitpicking an idea into shape.
The problem is if you’re stuck in the insulated world of perfectionism, that idea of yours is never going to take shape. It gets to remain perfect as long as it goes untouched, unrealized, unmade. And that’s a hell of a lot more comfortable than the vulnerability of putting yourself out there.
So you procrastinate by trying to make everything perfect, protecting yourself from exposure and naysayers, prioritizing daydreaming over taking charge of your life. The warm-and-fuzzies this inaction provides are a short-term salve.
In reality, it’s making you miserable.
It kills your creativity by telling you your ideas are terrible.
You second-guess, you hem and haw.
You scroll through Instagram with all those creators you want to be like and bitterly say to yourself, “one day when everything is perfect, I’ll be good enough, too.”
Well, guess what, sugar: you’re good enough right now.
Those people you look up to, the ones doing what you want to do? They’re where they are because they realized time was moving on with or without them. They could spend their time hiding behind perfection, or they could spend it trying and failing and trying again. It’s the experiences they’ve accumulated by actually doing the damn thing that made them so good!
Their first tries weren’t pretty or successful, I can guarantee you, and your first try won’t be either. That’s what perfectionism claims to be shielding you from. But remember how important learning is? Well, the best teacher is experience. If you want to be a painter, you have to mess up a few canvases in order to learn. If you want to be a chef, you’re going to get a few burns here and there as you grow.
Once you embrace the mantra of ‘good enough, you can start living the life you’ve been dreaming about.
Right now, you can take a deep breath and hit ‘publish’. You can pick up the brush; you can turn on the stove.
As you start living ‘good enough’, doors will open for you because you’ll actually have something to show! Ideas will have room to build on each other and opportunities will appear that otherwise never could have happened because perfection was squashing your creativity.
I used to wish I was a writer. I took classes and read books and listened to authors and filled my time doing everything but writing, all out of fear. I write now — some people like it, some people don’t. Each article and essay, I learn something and I get better. Once I decided to shrug off perfectionism and just write already, even less-than-stellar feedback has been MUCH better than wallowing in jealousy and insecurity.
Honor your creative self. Give your ideas room, in reality, give them life. You’re good enough.
