What Perfectionism Was Really Keeping Me From Doing 

I thought perfectionism was helping me protect the quality of my work. I didn’t realize it was keeping me from having any work to improve.

Perfectionism is one of the reasons I stepped away from my website for such a long time.

I had ideas and wanted to write and share what I was learning and thinking about. But nothing seemed quite good enough to put out there.

I’d write something and wonder whether someone else had already said it better. I’d think, Who am I to say this? Then I’d imagine putting something out there that wasn’t quite polished and people seeing all the things that were wrong with it.

What if they thought it was silly, or it looked messy or amateurish? What if people talked about it?

There were also all the things I thought I needed to figure out first. The website needed work. I hadn’t decided how to organize the articles or where everything was going.

I could spend a lot of time convincing myself that I was almost ready.

And “almost ready” was a comfortable place to stay. I wasn’t exactly giving up. I was still thinking about the website, planning what I wanted to do and trying to make decisions. From the inside, it could look a lot like progress.

Looking back, I think perfectionism felt less like being stuck and more like being careful. I cared about what I was creating and wanted to do a good job.

I just didn’t realize how easily “I want this to be good” could turn into “I can’t move forward until I’m sure this is good.”

So when I think about the ways perfectionism was holding me back, I don’t think the problem was simply that my standards were too high. It was what those standards required too much of me before I could even get started.

1. When Perfectionism Stops You From Starting

This is probably the most obvious one to me now, but I don’t think I fully saw it at the time.

I thought my high standards were helping me make something better, and sometimes they were. At a certain point, though, those standards couldn’t improve what I was creating because I wasn’t creating anything.

Instead, I was thinking about what I wanted to make, planning it and rearranging it in my head. I kept waiting until I knew exactly what I wanted to say and how everything should fit together.

Meanwhile, nobody could actually see any of it.

There was always another reason to wait.

That’s one of the strange things about perfectionism. You can spend so much time trying to make something better that the thing never actually gets made.

That’s also where perfectionism and procrastination can become difficult to separate. Procrastination doesn’t always look like avoiding something because you don’t care. Sometimes it looks like caring so much that you keep preparing instead of beginning.

For me, perfectionism wasn’t just making the work take longer. It was stopping me from starting in the first place.

But that raised another question for me: What exactly did I think would happen if I started before I felt completely ready?

2. How Perfectionism Makes You Afraid to Be Seen

This one was harder for me to admit because I wasn’t only concerned about whether I thought something was good.

I was imagining other people seeing it before I felt completely comfortable with it. Maybe someone would think what I said was silly or wonder, She’s really putting this out there? They might notice something that wasn’t quite right or talk about how messy it was.

I think that’s part of why perfectionism could feel protective to me.

If I could get everything polished enough, thoughtful enough and organized enough before anyone saw it, maybe there wouldn’t be anything for anyone to criticize.

Of course, I couldn’t actually guarantee that. Someone can misunderstand something I’ve written or simply not like it. Someone else really may have said something similar before.

I knew that intellectually. What I didn’t realize was how much I was allowing the possibility of someone else’s reaction to determine whether I created or shared anything at all.

The safest way to make sure no one criticized my imperfect work was to make sure no one ever saw my work.

And for a while, that’s pretty much what I did.

Once I saw that, “just stop being a perfectionist” didn’t seem like a particularly useful answer. I wasn’t going to suddenly stop caring about quality or stop caring what anyone thought. I needed a way to keep caring without making certainty a requirement for doing anything.

3. Progress Over Perfection Can Start With a Little Mess

As I’ve come back to my website, I’ve been practicing something that sounds simple:

Let it be messy at first.

The at first part matters to me.

This isn’t about not caring how something turns out or convincing myself that sloppy work is wonderful. It’s about allowing the beginning to look like a beginning.

I might start writing before I know exactly how the article is going to come together. Something can go on my website and, once I see it there, I may realize I want to organize it differently.

It doesn’t have to stay messy.

I’m just not requiring myself to eliminate every bit of mess before I’m allowed to move forward.

That has been an important distinction for me because “progress over perfection” can sound as though you’re supposed to stop caring about the result. That’s not what I want. I still want to make things better. I’m just trying to change when I require that improvement to happen.

Some of it can happen after I’ve begun.

4. “Good Enough” Can Mean “Good Enough for Now”

I’ve never particularly liked the phrase “good enough” because, to me, it sounded like settling.

If I knew I could make something better, why would I knowingly accept something that was only good enough?

Then I started adding two words:

Good enough for now.

That feels completely different to me because “for now” leaves room.

This doesn’t have to be the best I can do or something I’m finished with forever. I can still care about whether it’s thoughtful, useful, clear and well done while allowing this version to be good enough to move forward with.

There’s room to come back, change it and know more tomorrow than I know today.

For someone like me, that little qualification makes “good enough” much easier to live with.

It also changes what moving forward means. Publishing something doesn’t have to be a declaration that I’ve reached the final, permanent version of what I think. It can simply mean that this is what I can make with what I know right now.

But even that requires trusting that “for now” really can be temporary.

5. What if the Trust You Need Comes After You Start?

I think this may be one of the deeper things I’ve started noticing.

For a long time, I was trying to get the work to a point where I trusted it enough to share it. Now I’m starting to think I was looking for trust in the wrong place.

Maybe I don’t need complete confidence in the thing I’m creating. Maybe I need more confidence in myself after I create it.

Can I trust myself to notice when something needs changing, come back and refine it, or handle realizing six months from now that I would say something differently?

I think I can.

That’s very different from trying to convince myself, This is perfect. Don’t worry about it.

Because sometimes it isn’t perfect, and I may look back and absolutely want to change something. I’m beginning to trust that I can deal with that when it happens instead of trying to prevent it from ever happening.

That may be one of the things perfectionism had backwards for me. I thought confidence had to come before action: first I would become sure, then I could move. Instead, some of that confidence is coming from moving forward and discovering that I can handle what happens afterward.

And there’s another reason starting matters: the work itself can tell me things I couldn’t know while I was still thinking about it.

6. Some of the Clarity You Want May Only Come After You Begin

This surprised me.

I used to want everything in the correct order before I moved forward—the steps in place, where things belonged figured out, and some idea of what came next.

But some of those answers didn’t come until I actually made something.

Once I’ve written an article, I can see that a section doesn’t make sense where I put it. Seeing something on the website might show me that the organization isn’t working the way I imagined. I’ve even started explaining an idea and discovered that the part I thought was important wasn’t actually the part I cared about most.

I couldn’t have planned my way into all of those realizations.

Some of the answers I thought I needed before I started only showed up because I started.

That’s a problem if you’re waiting for clarity as permission to begin. Sometimes beginning is what produces the clarity.

I still like having a plan and knowing where I’m going. I’m just less convinced now that I have to know the entire route before I take the first few steps.

7. Perfectionism Can’t Refine What You Haven’t Started

This may be the simplest realization of all of them.

I can’t refine something that only exists in my thoughts.

Sure, I can think about it, imagine it and keep mentally adjusting what I might eventually create. But at some point, I need an actual thing in front of me.

Then I can look at it and think, Okay, this part works. This part doesn’t. That’s not quite what I meant. Maybe this belongs over here.

Now I have something to work with.

And that seems almost embarrassingly obvious once I say it. But when perfectionism is holding you back, it’s easy to spend enormous amounts of energy refining an imaginary version of something instead of creating the imperfect version that would actually give you useful information.

I think I used to believe the order was: figure it out, perfect it, then put it out there.

What I’m finding is that the process is much less tidy than that. I might create something, put it out there, notice something I hadn’t seen before and then make it better.

That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped caring about quality. I still reread things, change words and fuss over details, probably more than I need to.

What I am getting better at is catching myself when “I want to make this better” quietly becomes “I can’t move forward until I can’t find anything wrong with it.”

Those aren’t the same thing.

There are things I’m creating now that may look different a year from now, and I hope some of them do. I want to learn things, change my mind, find better ways to explain what I mean and get better at doing the work.

Looking back, I think I used to see that possibility as evidence that I should wait.

Now I’m starting to see it as the reason I don’t have to.

The fact that I may know more later doesn’t make what I can do today worthless. And the possibility that I’ll want to improve something later doesn’t mean I made a mistake by creating it now.

It can be messy at first and good enough for now.

If I see something later that needs to be better, I’m learning to trust myself to come back.

I’d rather have something real that I can return to than keep convincing myself that I’m almost ready to begin.