The Perfectionism Crutch
In his book, "Do The Work", Steven Pressfield talks a lot about finishing work and putting out in the world, as well as failure.
Chapter three of the book begins with Seth Godin's emphasis on "shipping", where Pressfield reminds us why shipping our work is so important:
"If we can't finish, all our work is for nothing."
And why are we so scared to ship?
Pressfield says: "When we ship, we're exposed. That's why we're so afraid of it. When we ship, we'll be judged. The real world will pronounce upon our work and upon us. When we ship, we can fail. When we ship, we can be humiliated."
But maybe shipping isn't about opening ourselves to judgment, maybe it frees us from the weight we put on ourselves.
"When we ship, we open ourselves to judgment in the real world. Nothing is more empowering, because it plants us solidly on Planet Earth and gets us out of our self-devouring, navel-centered fantasies and self-delusion."
I think that makes a lot of sense. I can't speak for everyone, but I know the majority of the time I am my own worst enemy, setting unreasonable expectations and putting unrealistic pressures on myself to meet them. When I fall short, I exhaust myself fighting to catch-up, which ultimately leads me to fall short on my next list of tasks...and the vicious cycle repeats.
One of the other things that I took from this book was a reminder that as professionals, we cannot take success or failure personally...and when we have a setback, we have to remember "That's the price for being in the arena and not on the sidelines. Stop complaining and be grateful."
On the bottom of this book's page, I wrote this to myself: "Being in the arena is much better than being on the sidelines. Professionals fail AND succeed, not fail OR succeed. It's not a binary, one-time event, it's a process.
In his 2015 Blog post "Abandoning Perfection", Seth Godin has this to say about perfectionism**:
Perfect is the ideal defense mechanism, the work of Pressfield's Resistance, the lizard brain giving you an out. Perfect lets you stall, ask more questions, do more reviews, dumb it down, safe it up and generally avoid doing anything that might fail (or anything important).
You're not in the perfect business. Stop pretending that's what the world wants from you. Truly perfect is becoming friendly with your imperfections on the way to doing something remarkable.
As much as I hate to admit it, I'm afraid to ship. I use perfectionism and waiting for the "perfect conditions" to begin something as a crutch, as a defense mechanism to avoid failing. After all, if I never start I can't fail. If I never finish, I can't fail either.
And avoiding failure is a much better feeling than success would be.
So now that I recognize this as a recurring issue, how do I address it?
Below are a few of the actions I've found to be helpful.
The first point is separating the process of writing into two distinct steps:
- Action - putting words on paper
- Reflection - evaluating what we have on paper
The first draft is light on reflection and heavy on action, but with each draft, I increase the ratio of reflection to action.
This process is critical to my writing because it forces me to suspend self-judgment and untie myself from what I think my work ought to or should look like. Pressfield suggests that creativity doesn't operate within "the lines", so by putting aside conventional expectations I can get the evidence I'm seeing down on paper and allow the story to construct itself.
When I look back, I realize the best analysis I've done occurred during the times when I didn't have to "massage" the story, the charts and evidence told the story, I was simply acting as the messenger.
The second point is that I do all of my research first, then begin writing. By putting the charts and data together first, I can avoid switching back and forth between story-telling and research.
Multi-tasking doesn't work for most people. Sure, nothing is stopping me from trying to prove those studies wrong, but objectively I know my best work is done when I just shut everything off and focus.
The last point is putting strict timelines on the tasks I'm completing (i.e. 2 hours to write this blog post). When I first became conscious of this problem, I began to track where I was spending my time on each post and realized that it took me the same amount of time, if not more, to complete the last 20% of my post as it did the first 80%.
Very rarely do I ever feel my work is as good as it could be, but the incremental changes I make when I do take that extra time are not moving the needle in terms of value provided to the reader. It makes me feel better, but objectively it makes little sense for me to keep editing something that's "good enough."
These simple guide rails help me work through my fear of failure and psychological need to have a perfect product and publish the damn thing, this piece included.
Also, I've finally accepted that I will never know what's truly a piece of work that will gain traction and what won't until after the fact. I've written things that I thought were surely some of my best pieces of work, pouring everything I had into them, only to receive a lackluster response.
Other times I've thrown something together on a 20-minute subway ride and it's received as the greatest thing since sliced bread.
I used to let that frustrate me, but now I've accepted that I just don't know what will and won't gain traction. My focus instead should be on putting out good, consistent content. So that's what I do.
Lastly, on the subject of imperfection, I really liked what &source=gmail&ust=1559096341362000&usg=AFQjCNH5plzHt5pE2EogET17CK_G5t2goA" rel="noopener">Morgan Housel said on the Standard Deviation's Podcast with &source=gmail&ust=1559096341362000&usg=AFQjCNGZILB2lNfAn5zwHyGCKwuXh1FZag" rel="noopener">Daniel Crosby when they were discussing the value of reading things outside of the field of Finance/Investing:
"...You're looking at this tiny sliver of the world when there's actually so much to learn about how people think about risk and opportunity from Politics, Military History, Physics and Academia. There's all these other fields that have examples of people making decisions with limited information around risk and opportunity, which is what investing is, that we can learn from."
No matter how much research we do into an individual company or market thesis, we will never have all of the information we need to make a "perfect" decision about how to act, so I might as well accept that and do what everyone else is doing...the best I can.
I could write a lot more on this, but I think this is a good stopping point.
In March I promised myself that I'd share more of my thoughts here, so I hope this post and others like it add value to your process.
More importantly, I hope it encourages you to identify and work on some habits/biases that may be making your process less effective and efficient.
Thanks for reading.
-Bruni
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*I say important because I'm still not there in terms of self-confidence, but in actuality, these things are very low pressure. If it was truly terrible, they wouldn't air it...and if it was good...nobody would remember in 3 days anyway. In the age of the internet, both good and bad things only keep people's attention for a brief moment.
**A more recent interesting article by Seth Godin, "Time Travel Is Exhausting" is also a great read on this subject.