If there’re a few things humans are greatly good at in marked comparison with other species, certainly, the ability to craft hundreds of different ideas and solutions for similar kinds of problems and be able to relate with them would come on top. Our vision is limitlessly diverse, and everything that falls into the diversity — from the creation of marvels to correspondence in relationships —provides rational explanations to what extent we can/will go to innovate.
In fact, we come up with new ideas every now and then, when we see something completely new or completely terrible, or when we dwell enough on where people wouldn’t look much. We even boil down an idea of someone else to create our own versions of it.
And then, if we think it’s good enough, we plan how to execute the idea.
Our executing ground could be a blog, or a movie, or a book, or a painting. The form of the art you are passionate about to convey your ideas to the world with hardly weighs against your potential. What matters, however, is getting to execute it.
The problem with seeing your idea come alive:
All you have about what you are going to do is only a vision.
The vision is beautiful.
You think reality may not prove as good as the vision.
Unless something can be done about it so that the vision can completely come off unrushed and perfect.
The time it takes for your vision to come off unrushed and perfect is literally forever.
You don’t have forever.
In hindsight perhaps, you might understand frustration is as much a part of the creation process as having a good idea is. Nothing you create will make you feel like it can’t be perfected more. There’s always going to be a part of your creation you had just let happen because you didn’t have any other way of putting it.
Successful people are often those who can see through their projects like that little blemish is not even there. They understand there’s always going to be a blemish, a deformity, or a tattered edge, and making it right in one place would tip the balance off on another.
They know the game, and maybe it’s not that hard to understand they’ve seen it work.
For the unsuccessful people, the blemish is right there in the centre even before they have started on their projects. And so they try to clear this imaginary blemish by building an imaginary castle to preserve their ideas under lock and key. The instant they let their ideas out in the open, there’s going to be immediate mucking up of the essence.
Now it becomes a jewel that’s so precious they’d rather not wear to the ball.
The purpose is lost.
The point is simple, and it is this: if you have an idea in your mind, don’t let it die of loneliness. If it isn’t as efficient, thought-provoking, life-changing, character-infusing as you thought it would be, then, maybe, let it die of impotence.
The “What You Should Know” part of this article falls into six major sub-headings:
Imperfection Doesn’t Matter as Much as You Think It Does
Take the Compulsion out of Your Purposeless Routines
Saving the Best for Last Isn’t the Best Strategy
Indecision Shouldn’t Bother Your Long Term Goals
The Icebreaker
Rise With Your Creative Flow
Imperfection Doesn’t Matter as Much as You Think It Does
If you only want the most perfect out of whatever you do, you better be having your definition of “perfection” right. That is going to define a great part of your productive career.
In the strive for the absolute best, you often wage toward what you have as standards for “perfection”, what you think perfection looks like, that often exceeds what you could get done in a respectable amount of time.
The problem is, there is no officially accepted standard that could be agreed on to be the best way to measure the level of perfection required. And what you measure yourself against is often like chasing the 4’o clock shadow of your greatest fantasies while facing away from the light of your passion.
It is a trick you pull on yourself to keep you working intensely around your goals and feel like gaining fast results while staying ignorant of the one direct path you could rather have taken for easy, dedicated achievement.
Perfection solidifies your fears about the worst thing that could happen to you in the process of creating. The bigger you have the “no man’s land” between stages of editing and publishing your work, the longer the battle is going to drag, and the more chance of getting your productivity killed.
Thomas Oppong wrote in his article about perfection, “The lack of perfection does not mean a lack of quality.” Although immense levels of perfection can make your work known for better quality than others with an incidental drawl, it’s hard to know when you should stop if you are hell-bent on filtering only the best through. More often than not, you get the result over-cooked with spices that are beyond the context. There was a point you should have stopped to have arrived at better quality than what perfection had you believe.
If you put all your thoughts in a balloon and began to blow it with the air of your “perfection”, you are either going to overdo it and get it blown, or going to under-do it enough to miss the point of a balloon.
All the while, you are ready to expend all your resources and time. The more perfect you want your work to be, the more time you think it should require.
Everything then lands on a sophisticated paradox:
Procrastination destroys creativity, but you love your creativity so much you want it to come out the most perfect — the very want of which shuns you from actually doing stuff, and takes you back to procrastinating. What you thought should help you grow is the same reason you’re not.
On “How Perfectionism Is Destroying Your Productivity”, Darius Foroux wrote, “If you’re a perfectionist, you’re just a procrastinator with a mask.”
No matter how tough or easy it’s going to be, how long or short it’s going to need to get done, how much of it you are actually prepared for or not, if you are a perfectionist, it is going to be tough and take you so long that you are never prepared for it.
Procrastination becomes as much an excuse for perfection as perfection does for procrastination. They are not reciprocals that cancel each other out when required, rather, they are complements that tend to compound the effect.
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