Your Obsession With Perfection Is Threatening Your Dreams

Choose momentum over idealization.

Photo by Jared Rice on Unsplash

I tend to be a perfectionist when it comes to my work.

I’m not proud of it.

I visualize my goals as idealized dreams. I place these dreams on gilded pedestals and worship them reverentially as divine indicators of a self-articulated success.

Trouble is, raising dreams to this lofty status moves them out of reach for me. All I’m left with, then, is a hazy vision that has no immediate manifestation in the real world.

Let me give you an example. I have always wanted to be a writer. A prolifically published and (somewhat) successful writer.

So far, I have written two feature-length screenplays, two graduate-level dissertations totaling 522 pages, multiple blog posts, academic papers, journal articles, marketing and branding collaterals, book reviews, Medium posts like this one, a book chapter even. My work has been published multiple times, I’ve been nominated for an award and, occasionally, complimented on my craft.

Yet, do I consider myself a writer? Not in the way I had imagined.

You see, in my dreams I become a writer only when I author a bestselling novel or when I write articles that get published by a leading…