You Don’t Need to Be Perfect — Just Do It Anyway

How to overcome the paradox of perfection.

How Perfectionism Is Holding You Back

I see so many people striving towards the ideology of being flawless.

Especially in the content creation space, you can spend hours upon hours obsessing over every tiny detail of whichever type of content you’re creating.

No matter how much effort you put into creating, words can always be rewritten, videos can always be edited differently, and pictures can always be painted in a different way.

What I’m trying to get at here is that more can always be done to improve upon something you create.

Ironically, it’s this very mindset that stops a lot of people from turning their ideas into reality.

I certainly was affected by this way of thinking. I obsessed over every article that I wrote since I wanted it to be written in the best possible way.

During this time, I released almost nothing. I spent all my time revising what I originally wrote until it was almost entirely different from what I initially had.

All of this work only led to me eventually giving up and accepting the fact that my article would live the rest of its life in my drafts folder.

My Change in Mindset

To combat this idea of perfectionism, I realized that a change in mindset was needed.

I took a step back to try and view this from an outsider’s perspective.

Here is what I learned:

You’re not making content for you.

The purpose of creating content is to be able to share it with the world.

Nobody goes through hours of the content creation process just to keep their work to themselves.

With this in mind, the thought of releasing something that’s ‘perfect’ becomes even sillier.

What’s perfect for you or me could be the complete opposite for somebody else.

Even the Mona Lisa has its critics, so don’t be too hard on yourself.

This was a change that I desperately needed. It took the pressure off of creating something flawless and allowed me to enjoy the process a whole lot more.

I’ve found that when I turn my focus to creating content that people can connect with, that’s when my best ideas flow.

It’s this mindset that gets me excited to turn my thoughts into concrete pieces of writing that have the chance to benefit people.

If you have a good message to spread to the world, don’t let feelings of inadequacy hold you back.

Conclusion

In the end, I’m not advocating for anybody to publish something that they’re not proud of.

A low-effort article riddled with grammar mistakes is something completely different than what I mentioned above.

I recognize that doing so is way easier said than done, but I hope that these ideas can give at least one person the push to move past this mental roadblock.

As always, thank you for reading. Leaving a comment is always a good way to connect, so I look forward to hearing from you!