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When I look back on the past
several years, I have to admit, I have some regrets.
I know it’s popular to say,
“Don’t regret anything because you learned from all of it.” But I’m just
gonna be straight with you, I regret some things that happened. Or in many
cases, things that didn’t happen.
To clarify, I regret things I
didn’t do more than the things I did do.
For example, some things I didn’t
do that I regret are:
·
Not buying a house when I had the
chance, before the real estate market went super nuts.
·
Not studying abroad while in
college (I graduated early instead), which I deeply regret.
·
Not publishing content, building
my list, and putting myself out there when I first felt that I had things
to share with the world.
You see, I kind of tried. I wrote
huge amounts of content that nobody ever saw. I built several websites that
barely saw the light of day. I went in circles tweaking, adjusting,
refining, and researching. It wasn’t good enough yet. Nothing was good
enough, ever.
In reality, I was letting
perfectionism paralyze me. I was using it as an excuse to mask my fear and
avoid doing what I needed to do. And a dandy excuse it was.
There is a difference between
having high standards for your work and being a perfectionist.
Reid Hoffman, the founder of
LinkedIn, said, “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your
product, you’ve launched too late.”
Most of us waste an enormous
amount of time and miss opportunities for growth simply by allowing
perfectionism to take over and keep us from getting our thing out there.
The longer we procrastinate and
tell ourselves “it’s not good enough yet,” the worse it gets until NOTHING
you create or build will be good enough, ever.
The mean voices that lurk in your
head will get louder and louder, striking fear into your psyche as they
implore you to wait, to refine more, to not do the thing.
That is no way to live.
Here are three
things to keep in mind when you are struggling with the dream-killing perfectionism
monster.
1. Take solace in
reassuring yourself that you can (and will) tweak and iterate several times
after you launch. Most people will never even see your “less than perfect”
version.
2. Even when you
feel you are light years away from being where you want to be, nobody on
the outside knows what your ultimate vision is. They don’t see the
shortfall you’re seeing.
3. Remember that
most people will never launch a thing into the world anyway. Your friends
and peers are probably so impressed that you’re even doing something, they
aren’t going to see the warts. They just see you doing cool stuff.
Almost all the products we love,
businesses that are dominating—and art, writing, services, music, you name
it—all started off as something that deeply embarrassed the creator.
Action Tip
Is there anything that you are
avoiding doing under the guise of “it’s not ready yet?” What has been on
your plate for far too long that needs to see the light of day?
When you think of launching it,
what comes up for you? What are you telling yourself that may not be true
or may not even matter much at all?
I wrote this
post a while back that got a lot of replies and comments: Anger
Shows You What Sucks, Here is How to Use it For Good.
Similar to anger, perfectionism
and procrastination show you what you are fearful of. I hope you find the
article helpful.
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