I’m No Longer a Perfectionist

And that’s a good thing

I’ve been writing on Medium for two years and it’s a great platform. It allows me to say what I want to say and present it in an attractive format. It even helps me to reach a range of readers that would otherwise be impossible — and all with minimal effort from my part.

Medium also allows you to make money. The idea is wonderful, and I’d absolutely love to make a living from writing on here, but for me that simply isn’t practical. Those who are bringing in real money have two things I don’t.

The first is commitment. That isn’t to say I’m not willing to commit, but I simply don’t have the time to do so. Success seems to come as much from quantity as quality on here. While you may get lucky and make a decent sum from any given article going viral, the chances are you won’t. But if you make at least a handful of dollars from each article, and are able to knock three or four out each day — that’s where the money is.

The other attribute I’m lacking also relates to the theme of how many articles I’m able to produce. It’s not just about how much time I have, but how I use that time.

I’m a perfectionist. That’s not to imply that I think any of my work is perfect, just that I like to make sure it’s the best it can be before I release it to the world. I’ve read a lot of advice on here that recommends that every writer on Medium should reread their work at least once before they hit ‘Publish’.

That’s never been a problem for me. If I keep my number of rereads in the double digits then I feel like I’ve rushed it. For however long I’ve spent writing an article, you can probably triple that for the amount of time spent scouring each sentence for something to polish.

What’s changed?

I’ve read a number of articles on here about the 30-Day Medium Challenge. One of the main aims of the challenge seemed to be increasing income, so I didn’t pay too much attention — as I’ve mentioned, that’s unlikely to work for me.

However, I noticed that people were documenting unforeseen results, and this interested me. So I took up the challenge (and wrote about it here).

I knew I wouldn’t be able to write enough to make the big bucks, but an average of one article per day for just one month seemed eminently doable. After the first week, however, I changed my mind.

I wrote an article in the evening, and set aside a couple of hours the following day to write another. When I sat down in front of the screen I had one last look over the previous night’s work before hitting ‘Submit’. Two hours later I was still touching it up and the next article had to go on the backburner for a few days.

This happened more than once, until I reached the point where I knew I’d be lucky to manage ten articles in the month, let alone 30. I needed to ‘let go’.

A little help from peers

But writing those stories still helped me a great deal. First of all, I had some positive feedback — no one implied I was ‘the greatest writer of our times’, but any compliment is nice. More importantly, no one jumped on me with a barrage of criticism.

Because of the need to continuously think of new things to write about, a lot of my subject matter has been outside my comfort zone (I’d never written about writing before, so even this article falls into that category). So, because I’d been even more tentative than usual, the lack of criticism (and even a little praise) gave me the confidence I needed.

Being accepted into publications was also a great help — this part of the challenge was new to me too, and proved that other people thought I was good enough.

The editing was mostly a waste of time anyway

This week I’ve managed to write, edit and submit articles in one sitting. This was previously unthinkable for me. But it has taught me something else: my perfectionism made very little difference.

The improvements I made were improvements, and my writing did get better, but not to any significant degree. I’ve realised that after the first few times I’m not really reading it anymore anyway — it’s like a kind of muscle-memory as I wait for imperfections to jump out at me.

Don’t get me wrong, I still reread them two or three times (the last has to require no edits or typo fixing) but that’s still a massive amount of time saved. I’ve reread this twice. If I’d done so fifty times, I’m sure it would be better — but not to the point you’d notice.

If overediting is something you’re guilty of, try not doing it — just once. You may find out the only difference is that you get more done, or at least the chance to sit back and enjoy that coffee in peace.

If anyone is interested in discovering what else I’ve learned over the course of this challenge, I’ve also written about how I managed to increase the value of a dollar: