Archive for the ‘Creativity’ Category
11 Reasons Why Perfection is Overrated!
For years, I was a real perfectionist. Not just a weekend perfectionist mind you, a full-blown “I won’t do it unless it can be perfect” kind of perfectionist. In fact, with a number of things I still exhibit some pretty nasty perfectionist tendencies which I’m working on eradicating.
The reason I started this project (Refocuser) in 2009 instead of 1999 when I first had the idea is because I spent 10 years fighting with myself about how to make it perfect, all the way down to how I’d organize the site’s content on my hard drive. Ugh!
Naturally, striving for your best work isn’t a bad thing… most people would never want to swing to the other extreme where quality and pride in the work are void, because that’s a real slippery slope to mediocrity. But I’ve found that for me, that’s pretty much a non-option given my personality. Keeping my perfectionist tendencies in check doesn’t have to mean that the quality of my output is going to suffer.
What I focus on instead of perfection is doing enough to get the most out of my efforts. The second I start trending towards the familiar “over-focusing”, I force myself to stop in my tracks and self-evaluate. More time spent on an activity very rarely equals higher quality in the kinds of projects I do – in fact, many times, it ends up being counter-productive – so not being a perfectionist can actually improve my work.
More is lost through indecision than wrong decision – Carmela Soprano
Finding Time to Write (Or to Get Into Creative Mode)
I’ve written this entire blog, past and future, in my head a dozen times over the last decade. I’ve mentally written millions of words and crystallized my perspective on the topics this blog will cover – but take a guess at what I forgot to do. Write it all down! What some would consider the easy part. Reason? Lack of time. Or so I’d been telling myself for years.
Everyone has probably heard these phrases:
- Winners make the time!
- If you don’t have the time, you don’t want it badly enough.
Naturally I agree with those statements in theory, but it’s always a lot harder to turn them into practice. How do you make the time when there are a thousand other important things pulling at your attention? The “answer” to that question is bigger than this one post – it’s the focus of this blog – so for now I’m going to cover the “rule set” I’ve followed for sitting down and writing this blog. These rules have worked well for the (very) short amount of time I’ve been employing them, and I expect they’re just the start of a longer list over time. They cover writing as an activity but could also be extended to just about any creative activity – simply replace the word writing with painting, dancing, graphic design, or whatever else you’d like to focus on.
Before jumping in however, it’s important that you’ve already made the commitment to yourself that whatever it is you want to invest in creatively is important to you. Do you consider it an important part of your core values or mission? Is it one of your top 3 focus areas? Do you have both long-term and short-term goals relating to this activity and have you written them down? If you’ve answered no to any of those questions, you have to ask yourself if you’re actually going to “make the time” for something that doesn’t align with who you ultimately want to be. Do you “want it badly enough”? Think about it before taking the next step.
