Confessions of a recovering perfectionist

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

I was a magazine editor, for much 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 it count.?

And 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.?

You don’t get a second chance at this: once the issue goes to press, any mistakes are permanent. It’s easy to become obsessive.?And I did.?

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

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

• Great ideas for books I didn’t write because I didn’t think I knew enough.
• Repainting the bedroom walls in our first flat again and again until I got the precise shade of dark blue I’d imagined. Then not changing the colour again for the entire decade we lived there because I couldn’t face going through the whole process again.?
• An editor at a prestigious magazine once asked me for some ideas. At the time, it would have been a career-changer for me to get a story into this particular publication. But I spent so long researching, explaining and polishing these ideas that by the time I submitted them, the editor had left the job.?
• Writing a short feature and trying to interview every expert on the subject in the known universe. Then struggling to include all of their (often contradictory) views in 800 words.
• Opening files with names like ‘Draft 74’.
• Staying up all night doing last-minute tweaks and changes to a feature before handing it in to an editor who would often cut those same tweaks and changes, saying I’d got bogged down in detail.
• Getting snappy and defensive with said editor because I’d been up all night.?
• Wanting to start a blog. Not starting a blog. (For years.)
• Writing thousands of words for this site, yet refusing to publish regularly because the tone wasn’t quite right.
• Wanting to start a podcast. Not starting a podcast. (Still ongoing.)
• Spending hours looking for the perfect picture or trying to learn HTML/web design/write new code because a blog post didn’t look exactly how I wanted it.
• Refusing to delegate any of those tasks to someone who knew what they were doing because I knew exactly how I wanted it.
• Leaving writing anything to the very last minute. Not because I was disorganised, but because it took the pressure off. With a deadline looming, I had to let go of perfectionism and write the best I could in the time I had left.
• As a technique for getting features written, this works very well. As a lifestyle, it sucks, with days of procrastination followed by frantic all-night writing sessions and cancelled social events.

I could go on, but I’m sure you get the idea.?Perhaps you’re even living in the shadow of perfectionism yourself.

Perfectionism kills creativity.

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

What changed it for me? Eventually, I got a coach. And he 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 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 here over the past few 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 other creatives. I’ve learned from the feedback in comments and emails from readers, but also by seeing which posts you shared and read through to the end.?

I’ve learned about what excites you and what pains you, where your blocks and challenges are and what you find useful. Very little of this matched what I’d assumed you wanted, when I first launched The Creative Life.?

Done really is better than perfect.

I was astonished to discover that Facebook once had ‘Done is better than perfect’ written 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.)

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.?

Put your imperfect work out there, and magic happens.

This was the real revelation. Even the messy, imperfect posts I’ve shared have led to opportunities, clients, meetings, workshops, new friendships I wouldn’t now have if I was still polishing, instead of publishing.

I wish I’d understood this earlier. Most of the magazines I sweated over are long gone. When discussing them now, people rarely mention the mistakes, glaring though theywere to me.

Instead, they remember the successful covers, stories that resonated with them, photographs that made them look at someone or something with fresh eyes.?

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.?Ans we forget the flawed bits in between. Or we treasure them because they make our heroes seem more… human.

Over and over, I now watch clients 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.?The more you make, the more chance you get of those happy accidents.

But it’s not just about the 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.?The magic that happens when we make more, and care less .

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

Sheryl Garratt is a writer and a coach helping creatives get the success they want, making work they love. Are you ready to grow your creative business? Click to get my?10-day course ?sent to your in-box now. It’s free!