Successful Medium Writers Are Not Perfectionists
They overcome the fear of failure and publish often.
I struggle with perfectionism.
It’s a kind of sickness that holds us back from progress. As perfectionists, we wake up to chase an ideal that we’ll never catch and focus on a day that will never come.
As writers, our perfectionist inner-editor can take over, editing each word as we type it out. We delete until we have nothing left to say.
I’ve often read the work of writers here on Medium and wondered how they got so many followers with such shoddy writing and weak content. You know how? They wrote, and they pushed publish.
What’s the difference between these writers and myself?
I’m more afraid than they are. I care too much about my reputation. I’m more interested in the way I’m viewed by others than in having ideas and getting them out there. I’m not willing to take the risk.
Successful Medium writers are vulnerable and willing to fail every day.
Perfectionism is fear
We’re afraid that our thing will fail, that others will judge us for how it looks and sounds. We’re anxious, and perfectionism is our way of looking smart while we hide in fear.
Perfectionism is often about us, not about our work, our writing, or our cause. We want the thing to be perfect because we want to be seen as capable, as special, as perfect.
Perfectionism is a fear of living life. We want our writing to be like our Facebook posts and pictures: shot from the best possible angle — the one that reveals our attractiveness, intelligence, and uniqueness.
But that’s really boring…
Medium is about saying something. Sometimes you’re going to really hit the nail on the head. And sometimes you’re going to miss it and smash your thumb. Swing anyway.
Overcome perfectionism by…
- Publishing often. Everybody has time to write and publish every day. You just don’t think the time you have is adequate to produce something you’re proud of. Start with what you have.
- Experiencing small doses of failure. What I mean is, publish stuff that you know could be better if you had another hour to work on it. You’ll become more and more immune to the fear of looking dumb as you release things you could have spent longer on.
- Embracing iteration. Iteration means that instead of waiting to release things until they’re perfect (again… it’s never going to happen!), we release things regularly and improve on our ideas and writing in subsequent work.
This does not mean that quality doesn’t matter or that it’s about ‘quantity over quality’. I believe in the principle of ‘quality over quantity’. But I don’t believe in using ‘quality over quantity’ as an excuse for perfectionism.
This also does not mean that I don’t think you should spend a lot of time crafting an article you’re proud of. Typos suck, and poor grammar is not fun to read. But there’s a difference between shipping something as soon as it works (including proper grammar), and anxiously editing your ideas and your writing for hours, hoping that no one will notice that you’re not perfect.
The best Medium writers get their work out there.
They’re not afraid to receive feedback and corrections. They know you can’t enjoy the game until you’re playing it. I’ve seen people like Tim Denning publish 3 or more articles in a day. Tim puts out lots of quality content, but I’m sure he still feels that little rush of fear as he hits publish.
The only way to get over the fear of being imperfect is to embrace it. You’re not perfect; your writing’s not perfect; Tim’s writing’s not perfect. But it’s good enough to make a difference in someone’s day.
Nothing will happen on Medium until you push publish. And you can always write something better tomorrow.