Your biggest competition as a creator is yourself. The sooner you realize this, the sooner you can overcome the obstacle of perfectionism holding you back from accomplishing your best work.
Striving for perfection is the root of procrastination among creatives. It is the fear of a negative outcome. Perfectionism is when the fear of shame and judgement dominate thought. It is an attempt to avoid the pain that comes with failure. At its core, perfectionism is procrastination.
The entire belief is based on a lie, that perfection is attainable. This fear of pain, judgement and blame is what keeps you thinking it’s better to not move at all than to risk falling on your face.
As a fellow sufferer of both perfectionism and procrastination, I experience these challenges every day. For the longest time, I let perfectionism hinder my creative output. If I had never made efforts to overcome it, you would not be reading this extremely imperfect newsletter right now.
I had been wanting to make YouTube videos for nearly a decade. Instead of just making videos and seeing what happened, I watched from the sidelines, as a consumer. I saw the quality of videos increase drastically, which fueled my avoidance of making my own. I didn’t even have editing software, how could I compete with creators who have years of experience in Adobe Premiere?
I wish I knew sooner that my only competition was myself. That all changed when I decided to start making short form content to warm myself up to talking in front of a camera. The imperfect and authentic style of TikTok videos helped lower my unrealistic standards.
I pressed record with my selfie cam and spoke for 30 seconds in my poorly lit kitchen about how ADHD is a dopamine deficiency. That video ended up educating 1.9 million viewers. If I had not abandoned perfectionism, I would have educated 0 people instead.
What I learned was that while the wrong limitations can restrict creative output, good limitation can enhance it.
While Victor Hugo was writing “Les Misérables”, he found himself struggling to meet his deadline for the manuscript, causing him to procrastinate. Hugo then devised a hilarious yet genius limitation to force himself to complete the novel. He instructed his servant to take away all his clothes, leaving him with nothing but a large shawl to wear while he wrote!
Without any clothes to wear outdoors, Hugo had no choice but to remain indoors and focus solely on his writing. This is known as a forcing function, an external trigger that forces one to reshape their behavior to achieve an expected outcome. As a result of Hugo manipulating his external environment, he was able to overcome procrastination and complete the masterpiece “Les Misérables” on time.
The good news is, you don’t have to make someone remove all the clothes from your house to experience the benefits of forcing functions. Instead, get another person to be present in the room with and tell them you plan to accomplish a certain task. That person being present acts as an accountability trigger to force you to focus. This is known as body doubling and it can even be done remotely in a virtual workspace.
Unless the project you’re working on has a real deadline, you don’t have to impose one on yourself. Allow your creative work to flow with your interests. Da Vinci leveraged his curiosity to accomplish his greatest creations, but he was also famous for not finishing his work.
“Art is never finished, only abandoned.” -Leonardo Da Vinci
Know that it is only your own thoughts preventing you from accomplishing creative work, not the work itself.
“Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” –Andy Warhol
No creative work is truly complete until you release it into the world and it becomes a tangible reality. Whether your idea is an action or a physical creation, expect to constantly iterate, test, and refine it. Failure provides valuable data for you begin this process, making it a necessary ingredient in generating creative outputs.
Instead of aiming for an A+, aim for a B-. Even if perfection were attainable, it is guaranteed you won’t achieve it unless you start from imperfection.
Hold yourself accountable to share your creations with others. By welcoming feedback as an essential part of the creative process, your work will greatly improve. Consider their responses new material that you can draw from the next time you’re embarking on a creative endeavor.
Stay curiously imperfect, my friend.
-Tony
P.S. Both creative work and the ADHD brain thrives in community. Stay tuned because next week I will be shooting you an invite to the beta launch of a private community site I am launching called Flow Labs. I am very excited to engage with you there.