Is aiming for perfection holding you back?
Sure, getting rid of typos and fixing glaring errors is important. But if you’re waiting to launch your website or start tweeting or record your first podcast until all conditions are perfect and you’ve tied everything up in a shiny bow, it’s just not gonna happen. At least, not anytime soon.
Exhibit A: me.
Before launching this website, I agonized over the content. Since I’m a writer, all the words had to be perfect, didn’t they? I ended up being paralyzed by the inability to reach perfection. I wrote and re-wrote, tinkered and hesitated… and didn’t have a website to show for it.
Eventually I realized expecting perfection was ridiculous. I was getting nowhere. So I took the perfectly-fine-if-not-perfect words I already had and suddenly, finally had a website.
Of course it’s not a shining example of perfection. I’ve fine-tuned the words many times and they aren’t perfect; they never will be (although you’ll have to look hard to find typos). But, as the farmer says to the pig in Babe, “That’ll do, Pig. That’ll do.”
So if you’re waiting to do something until all conditions are perfect, cut yourself a little slack. Do your best to get version 1.0 out the door, and work on making it better afterwards.
Have you learned to let go of perfection? What tips can you share?
(Thanks to my colleagues at a recent networking event with IABC/Toronto’s Professional Independent Communicators for the inspiration behind this post. Go ahead, you can do it!)
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Image: Gift box by Master Isolated Images and FreeDigitalPhotos.net.