First, I want to thank the new flood of subscribers who found me this week (and
for the boost). Welcome! I guess I have to write something now…My mom was one of the most creative and talented people I have ever known. When she was very close to the end of her life, one of the things I was able to do was hold her hand and thank her for teaching me how to be creative. She could cook, sew, design, event plan, write, run businesses. For anything she wanted to do, she would study until she knew everything about it and then to do it like a pro.
Despite her many incredible accomplishments, she had a self-imposed standard of perfection that she never escaped because if she couldn’t do something excellently, she wouldn’t do it at all. Sadly, this left her with a list of things she always dreamed of doing - and would have accomplished, no doubt - but never attempted.
I was born with the curse of perfection too.
When I was growing up, there were so many things I wasn’t brave enough to stick with because I couldn’t bear to be mediocre at anything. I quit soccer, baseball, basketball, surfing, drawing classes, piano, and advanced classes in school all because I wasn’t excellent at them.
I’m grateful for the things I was good at because that meant I stuck with them - leadership through student government, computer games and computer graphic design, water polo, knowing everything I could learn about Star Wars and movies in general, decorating school events and designing and building homecoming floats, and writing skits for school assemblies. You could argue that I took the easy route by focusing on what came naturally to me, but these things brought me joy and became the foundational experiences of my life.
Later in college, I struggled for two-and-a-half years to find a career that fit my natural talents, and I was miserable. This is what happens when the real world doesn’t match up to what you’re actually good at. Then, thankfully, I kept looking and stumbled on something I loved from the first day I tried it. Animation.
Making something come to life through a series of drawings was unlike anything I had ever experienced. It was pure joy, invention, and excitement, all from a pencil, some paper, and me.
My problem was, I was not a natural animator. I wasn’t good at it - at all - because I knew nothing about drawing or animating. To make things even more complicated, it turned out to be the hardest thing I had ever tried to do. The truth is, my life was a breeze until I tried to animate.
So I was met with the greatest challenge of my life. To do this thing that I inherently loved, I would have to endure years of being mediocre (and miserable) as I figured it out. What followed was a decade of internal struggle between my instinct to run away from difficulty and my desire to become an animator (and in my case that meant a “perfect” animator).
These two sides battled it out like this: I’d wake up and dread going to work. Once I got to work, I’d procrastinate all day because I didn’t think my animation would be good enough. But I had to animate something to not get fired, so I’d work into the late hours of the night catching up. Exhausted, I’d sleep in the next day, then wake up and dread going to work… Repeat.
I was doing the work, but at a safe distance, never embracing the fact that if I just dove in with all of my being and accepted my mistakes and learned from them, I would get much closer to the place I wanted to be, and in less time. Instead, that curse of perfection kept me from fully committing and it hobbled my growth.
I know why now. If you’re not giving 100% and you don’t succeed, you have a plausible excuse. But if you give it everything you’ve got and you still fall short, you have no one to blame but yourself. At least that’s how my mind worked back then.
I have an entire story of how I eventually went to therapy specifically to fix my perfectionism - and it actually worked (well, mostly) - but I want to save that for another time so I can get to the point of all this.
Some people never get as far as my mom or me. They are so terrified of not being perfect, or good, or even mediocre, that they never try at all. They fear judgement, comparison, expectations, or disapproval so much that they would rather watch other people do creative things and only dream they could be creative too.
Since I am a recovered perfectionist, please listen when I say this: Doing something poorly and learning from it is infinitely better than doing nothing at all. I fuck up things all the time now, and that’s okay, because that’s what it takes to create the good stuff.
If you have the curse of perfection, do this: pull out your list of dreams and pick one. It doesn’t even have to be your biggest dream. Just pick one thing, and take one step on that path. ‘Create’ can feel like an intimidating word, so simply ‘try’ something that you’ve never done before, and then do it again, and again, and again, and I promise your life will be better for it.
If anything I write inspires a thought, I’d love to read your comments so this can be less of a bullhorn and more of a conversation.
Thanks Clay.
This really resonated with me. I was very much the same at school and have had a similar experience since graduating in 2021. But since then I've learnt to make mistakes, seek out new opportunities, though a part of me is definitely in that not-giving-it-100% mindset.