Confessions of a recovering perfectionist

My name is Sheryl, and I’m a perfectionist.

I was a magazine editor, for large parts of my working life. It’s a job where content is key, ideas your currency. You only get one chance a month to impress your readers, so you want to make the best issue possible.

But once the words and pictures are on the page, it’s all about the detail. The headlines and captions, spelling and grammar, the paragraph breaks, typography and the turn arrows. It’s easy to become obsessive. And I did.

(Though the perfectionist in me wants to be honest and say that deadlines being deadlines, there were still plenty of mistakes!)

This is what my perfectionism has looked like, over the years.

I could go on, but I’m sure you get the idea.

Holding yourself to impossible standards is restricting, suffocating. It stops you sharing your work with the world. And it’s the sharing which often helps you learn and improve.

Eventually, my coach intervened and said something liberating.

I was explaining how I’d failed to launch my website yet again because neither the tone nor the design felt right. And he laughed. “You know hardly anyone will even look at it in the first year?”

I did know.

I’d read and researched enough about building a presence online to know it would be 12-18 months before people came to my site in significant numbers. But I hadn’t taken on board how freeing that fact was.

I could play, experiment, publish less-than-perfect posts and find my way because no one was watching. So I committed to post once a week on my messy, clumsy site, a schedule I’ve stuck to pretty much ever since.

It was hard, getting over myself.

I had to publish even when I didn’t feel ready. So I’ve posted some shoddy articles over the past 2-3 years. I’ve gone down a lot of blind alleys. There have been typos and mistakes, images that didn’t quite fit the text. The site itself is still a little clunky, but I’ve made improvements gradually. And learned to let others help.

But I’ve also published articles I wrote quickly and easily – something I’ve always been suspicious of, in the past – and found they resonated with my target audience: other creatives. I’ve learned from the feedback in comments and emails from readers, but also by seeing which posts they shared and read through to the end.

I’ve learned about what excites them and what pains them, where their blocks and challenges are and what they find useful. Very little of this matched what I’d assumed ymy audience, when I first launched The Creative Life.

Done is better than perfect.

I was astonished to read that Facebook once had this slogan on the walls of its corporate HQ. Why would such a huge, well-resourced company want to put out anything that wasn’t as good as it could be? Good enough, to me, was a sign of laziness. Of low standards. (And if you identify with that, here’s the book to read: Laziness Does Not Exist, in which Devon Price deconstructs the whole idea of being lazy.)

But I’m learning that you can continue to revise and improve. Over time, I’ve deleted weaker posts on my blog. I’ve rewritten ones that didn’t quite work, added extra information, found better illustrations. Unlike a book or a magazine issue, in the online world we can keep tweaking, polishing, making the content more relevant.

But even the messy, imperfect writing has led to opportunities, clients, meetings, workshops, new friendships I wouldn’t now have if I was still polishing, instead of publishing.

This is also true in the offline world.

Most of the magazines I sweated over are long gone. When discussing them now, people rarely mention the mistakes. Instead, they remember the successful covers, stories that resonated with them, photographs that made them look at someone or something anew.

We all edit our memories.

We remember the books that changed us, the art that moved us, the jokes that made us laugh until it hurt, those joyful moments in a club or at a festival when the music brings the crowd together into one vast living organism. And we forget the flawed bits in between.

Again and again now, I watch people perform their music or their standup way before it’s ready, put out tentative first mixes of tracks, early short stories, crude sketches, not-so-grand designs. And they learn from the feedback. They grow a following. Opportunities come their way.

You don’t have to be perfect.

You just have to do the work. To do your verbs. And start before you are ready. Because the more you write, make art, take pictures, dance, design, act, invent, create, the better you get. And maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll write a few perfect sentences. You’ll give a transcendent performance one night, or make some art that is better than anything you imagined.

But it’s not just about those perfect moments.

Creativity is about the tiny, incremental improvements which come when you show up regularly. The ideas that start flowing when your brain knows it can’t procrastinate its way out of it. Those accidental imperfections that make art or music truly moving.

We are not perfect, any of us. We are human. So let’s celebrate that. And get our work out there.