How to Overcome Perfectionism
Adopting a pragmatic mindset versus an idealist one
Life as a budding writer is tough.
It’s a daunting endeavor, which, at times, sucks away at your creative soul like a leech burrowing for blood in every orifice of your body; creeping, inching, seething its way through your heart and mind, until you have nothing left to give but the shirt off your back.
It’s rough sledding, is what I’m saying.
It can be difficult to find the time, let alone the energy, to produce quality work each and every day. But what we must understand is that writing is like life, a process; one that entails struggle, pain, and suffering to succeed.
Yet adversity is what makes us stronger; it shows us who we are.
Adversity Is the Way
“While it’s true that someone can impede our actions, they can’t impede our intentions and our attitudes, which have the power of being conditional and adaptable. For the mind adapts and converts any obstacle to it’s action into a means of achieving it. That which is an impediment to action is turned to advance action. The obstacle on the path becomes the way.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 5.20
I’ve been struggling to find a rhythm in my writing for a while now, and it’s frustrating, to say the least.
Everyday I’m scrolling through Medium and seeing the success of writers who, by luck or circumstance or both, are ahead of me on the curve, and I’m faced with the dilemmas: Why can’t I write like them? Produce like they do? Engage as easily as most? Or, at the very least, not give a f**k?
What all these questions have in common is the same principle: how we act in the face of adversity.
There will always be obstacles in our way that prevent us from achieving our goals; but within these adversities lies our strength — our ability to overcome the limits of our minds.
The better we handle adversity — to set aside pre-conceived notions and push past the limits of what we thought was possible — the stronger we become.
But if you’re like me, this is easier said than done.
I haven’t been handling adversity well.
I’ve been procrastinating, making excuses that are holding me back from producing at the rate necessary to grow as a writer, build an audience, and eventually, make money doing so.
And it’s because I was seeing in the wrong spectrum, looking at my circumstance and seeking the outcome rather than the process; perfection rather than good enough.
Idealism v. Pragmatism
“Do now what nature demands of you. Get right to it if that’s in your power. Don’t look around to see if people will know about it. Don’t await the perfection of Plato’s Republic, but be satisfied with even the smallest step forward and regard the outcome as a small thing.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 9.29.(4)
When I was a boy, my parents always asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. My answers, like some of yours may have been, were something like: millionaire, astronaut, doctor, lawyer, successful businessman, etc.
Back then, I thought these were reasonable goals, easily achieved if I hoped and wished hard enough. But, in my youthful exuberance, what I failed to consider was what it would take to have such a life.
You see, I tend to focus on the idea, rather than the work; the romantic side of things, rather than the practical.
It was only recently that I started to see the practical side of things — once I started accepting that things happen contrary to our plans and beliefs. “If not today, then certainly tomorrow,” says Ryan Holiday in the Daily Stoic.
Through Stoicism I’ve learned that our minds are infinitely elastic and adaptable to the challenges put before us.
Our minds want adversity — seek it out, even — because we know, at some core level of our being, that overcoming adversity is the way towards progress, growth, and becoming the best versions of ourselves.
Every impediment can advance action in some form or another.
— Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic
This is how we become stronger writers, stronger creatives, stronger human beings for the betterment of the world and everyone in it: by seeing that each obstacle on the path to success is a means to grow, build virtue, and practice excellence.
But to do so, you must adopt a pragmatic approach.
Perfection Is the Enemy
Have you ever spent thirty minutes writing and re-writing a two sentence email, believed that missing two points on a test meant you were a failure, or had trouble being happy for other people’s success?
Well, then you’re like me: a perfectionist.
You’re probably always looking to the end result as the most important part of any undertaking, and you probably don’t even start a task unless you know you can do it perfectly.
Yet there’s a saying: “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough.”
Perfectionism is a trap. It’s an absolute notion, an all-or-nothing idealist conception that something — anything! — can live up to the standards of the gods.
But this is an ideal, not a truth.
It’s something we can never live up to, because it’s something that doesn’t exist.
Perfectionism rarely begets perfection — only disappointment.
Nothing in this life is perfect.
In fact, it’s imperfection that attributes to our humanity, because in imperfection lies the beauty of life; it’s ability to change, evolve, become better than it was before.
For life is imperfect.
Humans are imperfect. We constantly do things that are incongruent to a perfect world: we judge, criticize, exclude, extort, harm in any way shape or form, start wars and spread diseases.
We’re imperfect beings in an imperfect world, yet we’re seeking perfection like it’s a blow-out sale at the outlets — Everything 50% off the sticker price! Get it while you can!
As for me, I’ve been taking this notion to heart; I’m a romantic, an artist who wants to be what no art form can or should be. This is what’s been holding me back, and it’s what I’ve been trying to write about these past couple weeks.
And what I’ve learned is that it’s not practical to try to be perfect all the time; this will only cause you suffering. For whatever we do, whatever we create, there will always be external forces that bring us back to reality.
Outside voices or opinions that will intrude upon our idealist spaces of perfection and tear them down with a sentence, a phrase, a look, a snort of derision, or worse, nothing at all — Chrrp Chrrp.
So to counter this idealist notion of perfection, we must learn to accept that adversity is a fact of life. Yet it’s not one that we must bow down to, or waiver in the face of.
No; we must accept it — our situation, our circumstance, the world and everything in it — and see that, no matter how imperfect the world may be, we have important work to be done.
Of which, “Our pursuits should be aimed at progress, however little that it’s possible for us to make.”
Good enough; not perfect.
And it starts now. In this very moment.
Because, practically speaking, we are where we are; not where we want to be.
Perfectly imperfect.
Accept it.
