To Become Prolific, Replace Perfection with Trust
Create value by fusing with the creative process
With creative production, you’ve got roughly two paths to choose from: you can be perfect or prolific. Perfectionism is appealing and safe. Being precious about what you release into the world saves you from cringing two weeks from now as you read an article filled with half-formed conclusions.
When you fear that you’ll put too much time and effort into something and get no results from it, being prolific can feel instinctively wrong.
But what’s truly better? Having a large body of imperfect work, or one or two really great essays? The former is better. An imperfect approach applied consistently is better than a perfect approach applied twice monthly.
Despite the fact that prioritizing action over perfection goes against certain intuitions, it provides the same route to excellence that we’re looking for when we become perfectionists. But it’s a lot less painful.
Honor your unconscious competence
“Start where ever you are! Low-hanging fruit really tastes as good as the high stuff!” -Bhishek Shukla
Most creators have moved past the idea of writer’s block, now recognizing it as resistance. As Steven Pressfield suggests in The War of Art, resistance is a force that works against human creativity.
Resistance appears in many forms. Some are more subtle than others, appearing as virtues. Perfectionism is resistance in one of its endearing costumes. It says that you need a heightened level of clarity, attentiveness, and accuracy to move forward with an idea. It sounds nice. But resistance smirks at you, saying through its teeth that readiness comes only through the satisfaction of specific conditions.
In actuality, perfectionism is just an elevated form of self-doubt. It’s the denial that all the tensions you’ve resolved, all the books you’ve read and the experiences you’ve accumulated are insufficient for approaching what you need to do today.
But this is wrongheaded. If you trust that no matter where you are, it is sufficient for moving forward, it will be.
“All the foregone days of virtue work their health into this.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Depending on your mood, circumstances, levels of sleep, and so forth, creating feels more accessible some days than others. When resistance strikes, when you feel like writing a song or an article is beyond your capacity, I’m asking you to believe that everything you’ve experienced until that moment was exactly the preparation you required to keep moving.
Sure, not everything you create is going to be wonderful, but trusting your unconscious competence, or what I’m calling the foundational level of skill you’ve built throughout the prior days of your life, is all you need to progressively improve.
Don’t sacrifice the process at the altar of the end result
“This is a paradigm for non-action: the purest and most effective form of action. The game plays the game; the poem writes the poem; we can’t tell the dancer from the dance.” — Tao Te Ching
In his book, The Practice: Shipping Creative Work, Seth Godin suggests that the act of sharing creative work with the world is fundamental to the creative process.
The drive toward perfectionism would disagree, insisting on the incompleteness of your draft. Godin’s book offers a different perspective.
The Practice invites readers to leave behind the self-importance that lurks in our desire to “perfect” our ideas prior to sharing them.
Embrace this reality: you don’t know what the people of the world need to know today, tomorrow or eight months from now. To hoard ideas is to suggest that you have a complete understanding of the ways in which everyone is experiencing reality or will experience it in the future. Instead, you might share your ideas in celebration of everything you don’t know.
I’m not saying you should publish indiscriminately and never care about quality. However, where you fall on the spectrum between enjoying the process of creation and focusing solely on the end result determines whether or not your work resonates with your audience.
Overcome perfectionism by making your process as enjoyable for you as possible. Anchor it to a deeply felt desire. Or simply do what you do for its own sake, then it doesn’t matter how the reader or listener responds.
Look. You’ve got a limited time on the planet. If you’re a person with many ideas, take every opportunity to let them to expand. One day you’re going to die. Someone else is going to figure out what to do with your clothes, your dishware, your toothbrush. Someone else might plan your funeral.
What you can control is what you do with your mind today. Build a body of work to speak for you after you’re gone. You have too many ideas. You can’t waste time hoarding them until they’re flawless. Iterate until you’re excited and then step back.Take the time to infuse yourself into each one.
Trade the drive toward instant gratification for incremental change
“If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high you never do anything.” -David Foster Wallace
If you decide you’re going to create consistently, regardless of whether you feel like the work is good enough, you’re going to enter a paradox.
If you renounce the notion that you can’t act until you’ve attained perfection, you’re going to improve as a mere consequence of acting. Acting itself becomes the leverage point. In the process, you become a new person. Instead of producing four or five wonderfully written articles in three years, you write 500+ pretty good articles instead. You enjoy all the changes in perspective that come along with doing that.
In The Power of Awareness, Neville Goddard insists that to get what you want, you need to act from the perspective of the wish fulfilled, not of the end result.
When you create to create, you make your efforts worthwhile. Over time, you’ll enjoy the rewards that come with repeatedly expanding your comfort zone. You develop a different and much more blissful relationship with yourself and with your craft. From that zone, you’ll facilitate a high level of mastery without pushing or forcing anything.
“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all the teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and realizing it’s a feather bed.” -Terence McKenna
Act from the perspective of trust, not scarcity, doubt, or fear-based action. Creation for its own sake is an act of trust, and you will be rewarded for that trust immediately and in the progressive realization of your improved craft.