How to Know if You’re Sabotaging Yourself

A piece to all the perfectionists who try to create meaningful work, especially my past self

You’re thinking about it too much before you begin.

How hard are you working to get the result you want? What have you done to achieve the result?

The frustration you feel is a painful sense of entitlement.

It’s not completely your fault. We live in a culture that glamorizes “overnight success” and all the other anomalies, so you feel like your best efforts fall short.

They don’t.

Keep going. It takes time to get to where you want to be. Enjoy the journey of getting there.

What I’ve learned is that the journey is part of the mission.

You just want to be “there,” but there is a whole journey in the process of getting there. Enjoy that journey. That is what life is about.

We glamorize content that goes “viral,” when the truth is that so many of us are creating things every single day and very, very few people’s work actually go viral right off the bat.

But we are made to believe that’s normal, so if what we’re making doesn’t get any attention, we believe it’s our fault. It’s not good enough, is our mantra.

If you think it’s not good enough, so will everyone else, right?

On that note, you’re shooting down your ideas before even putting them out there in the world.

Whatever you make isn’t good enough, right?

It’s not going to be as good as what other people have made, is your personal narrative.

You’re not going to get as many views, comments, engagements, whatever. And you know it for a fact, don’t you? Because you’ve put so much out there already and it hasn’t worked, right?

…See? You’re not sharing your work. How are you going to get any further if you don’t put it out there?

The vision in your mind is so grand, the beginning already feels like a failure.

This is especially true for creative perfectionists. We have this idea of what we want our work to look like, so much so that we become attached to it. We are so attached to the idea of what our work will be, how it will affect people and what we think it needs to be that we forget what we’re doing in the first place.

We are too focused on the outcome, on the external measurements of our success that we don’t even get started.

What’s worse is that we become attached to the vision in our minds that are so amazing, the beginning already looks like a failure. Every step we take is staring us right back in the face with how much of a failure it is.

The irony is that we need to create a great volume of work to get to the point of creating the vision in our minds.

We have to close that gap, the space between our good taste and the work we’re actually creating, as Ira Glass says.

“It’s only actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap, and the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.”

You are way too consumed with the result and external validation.

You are working from a place of envisioning the result. You are not operating from the viewpoint of the process itself.

You aren’t imagining yourself getting lost in the creation, absolutely loving the process, and enjoying the work.

All of your focus is on what it is going to become, on what it is supposed to be.

The end result — the vision in your mind — is a guiding point. It is the lighthouse, a guide to follow in the sea of creativity and confusion. The process is being in the boat and steering the ship.

Use the light for reference. Follow it. But don’t be so dedicated to one set path.

You can go right, left, here, there, wherever. You’ll get to the lighthouse. It just might not be in the way that you expect.

It is okay to change course and it is okay that it looks completely different by the time you’re done. That’s creativity.

Isn’t it perfect?