Stop Wasting Time Being a Perfectionist

When you are first learning or perfecting a skill, whether it be baking, archery, or public speaking, it is easy to get stuck in the cycle of analysis paralysis. You want to learn as much as you possibly can before you actually do the task, but you end up wasting time preparing yourself instead of just trying to do it.

Major League Baseball pitchers don't throw a perfect game every time they play, so why do you expect to be perfect all the time?

Jonathan Fields recently wrote an excellent piece on how the key to getting better at something is to make more bad stuff.

That is a powerful message. In a world filled with perfectionists who don't want to share what they've created with anyone unless they think it is perfect, the best way to get better is actually with hands-on practice. And the best way to practice is by trying over and over again until you stop failing miserably.

Jonathan uses the example of building a guitar, but wanting the first one to be perfect.

'Go and make a really bad guitar.' Stop waiting around, go buy a kit and do it. Today.

The first one...will be bad. Maybe really bad. But you'll learn more making one bad guitar than you will waiting to do something and then taking a course that teaches you how to do it right. You'll understand a lot more about the "why" behind good and bad building, and that'll put you in a radically different position to do it better moving forward.

- Jonathan Fields