I struggle with creative perfection

You definitely won't do a good enough job. But that's the best part: loss is a given.

I struggle with creative perfection. I will create a post or a video and rewrite it and edit it and rewrite it and ultimately leave it in a draft stage until I forget about it. Weeks go by and then I stumble upon it again and restart the process.

A recent read of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman had enough passages to help me snap out of it:

When we find ourselves procrastinating… [w]e fail to see, or refuse to accept, that any attempt to bring our ideas into concrete reality must inevitably fall short of our dreams, no matter how brilliantly we succeed in carrying things off—because reality, unlike fantasy, is a realm in which we don’t have limitless control…Something—our limited talents, our limited time, our limited control over events, and over the actions of other people—will always render our creation less than perfect. Dispiriting as this might sound at first, it contains a liberating message: if you’re procrastinating on something because you’re worried you won’t do a good enough job, you can relax—because judged by the flawless standards of your imagination, you definitely won’t do a good enough job. So you might as well make a start.

I let that part sink in, “you definitely won’t do a good enough job”.

Here’s more, emphasis mine:

It’s easy for me to fantasize about, say, a life spent achieving stellar professional success, while also excelling as a parent and partner, while also dedicating myself to training for marathons or lengthy meditiation retreats or volunteering in my community—because so long as I’m only fantasizing, I get to imagine all of them unfolding simultaneously and flawlessly. As soon as I start trying to live any of those lives, though, I’ll be forced to make trade-offs…and to accept that nothing I do will go perfectly anyway. With the result that my actual life will inevitably prove disappointing by comparison with the fantasy.

And lastly:

Since every real-world choice about how to live entails the loss of countless alternative way of living, there’s no reason to procrastinate, or to resist making commitments, in the anxious hope that you might somehow be able to avoid those losses. Loss is a given. That ship has sailed—and what a relief.

So what to do now?

Keep moving

I’m also reading The Boys, Ron and Clint Howard’s autobiography about growing up in Hollywood. A 20 year old Ron worked with John Wayne on The Shootist which would be Wayne’s last movie. Ron asked Wayne during downtime what it was like to work with John Ford, considered the best Western director. Wayne’s response:

“Jack Ford always taught me to keep moving. And give the audience 80%.”

The key is not 100%. The other key is to not stop and think about the 80%, just do enough and move on. Sure it’s not perfect, but nothing ever is. Just keep going.