The Perfectionism Trap
William Shakespeare wrote 37 plays and 154 sonnets. Pablo Picasso created 13,500 paintings and designs. Alfred Hitchcock made 65 full-length feature films. The common denominator among all these artists, across different periods of time and varying access to technology, is that they were extraordinarily prolific.
They made a whole lot of art.
Looking at those numbers, it might be easy to characterize these artists as performing unique acts of genius. At the very least, they didn’t have to contend with the Internet and the age of push notifications threatening to derail the creative process at any moment. But attributing their prolific careers to either their being extraordinary or the problems of contemporary culture misses out on the real reason they were able to produce so much work: they didn’t let perfectionism get in their way.
They made a lot of work, some good and some not, but they never stopped churning out new material.
The major roadblock to building your own body of work isn’t your lack of anything. The major roadblock is letting perfectionism slow you down.
When you attempt to write the “perfect” screenplay, you continually rewrite — which is a cyclical process. You hold yourself back. You edit as you go. You don’t allow yourself to get it all out because you want it to be perfect right away. It’s difficult to feel “finished” because your perfectionism keeps you in editing mode.
This roadblock keeps you from a definitive part of your creative process: finishing your work.
When you complete a project, you have a better understanding of how it serves the larger cultural conversation. You can’t actually improve your work in the dark. It needs to see the light of day for you to learn more about it.
When you share it with the world, or at least acknowledge when it’s finished, you can discover deeper insights, learn to communicate more effectively and make stronger choices.
The more you make, the more you learn.
Thinking about building a body of work doesn’t have to be so serious, either. Approach production through experimentation. Let your curiosity wander without restrictions. Make something completely out of the ordinary to teach yourself something new. When you create to learn, you’ll grow exponentially more than when you create to achieve perfection.
NPR host Ira Glass said,
“For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit…And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.”
Staying caught in the perfectionism trap is a form of procrastination.
Make yourself move.
Make more work, just so you know how to get closer to that vision Glass says you started with in the first place.
