Done over perfect
PERFECT IS THE ENEMY.
DONE IS SUPREME.
I'm sure you've heard the expression before, but I've recently come face to face with how bad it can get left unchecked, so allow me to share here.
The minimum background you need for my anecdote is that I've always enjoyed writing and my friends tell me I can be pretty funny, both things that are fairly useful skills if you want to try content creation.
I never really intended to try and make something of it, but it seemed like a fun pastime, so why not.
I wrote some, and then, feeling I wasn't achieving my goals, I decided to change it up.
I end up with streaming as my go-to. That turns out to be a bust, but a story for a different day, and so I'm back to nothing.
Skip a couple months more, and I'm once again feeling the itch to do something.
So I wrote some.
I wrote a bunch of stray documents, and in looking for one particular one, I scrolled farther than I meant to.
Cue the object of interest: writings I forgot about.
I open it, give it a read, and much to my surprise, not only is it more or less complete except for a bit more in the closing lines, I'm also pretty happy with the quality of it.
But get this: IT'S A FRIGGIN’ WASTELAND HERE! [Show videos tab of channel]
I let perfectionism get ahead of my desire to create, and it stalled me. I'm talking basically finished documents from 2021 and 2022, but there were these little tiny things I remember feeling “wasn't there” or wasn't exactly what I wanted when looking at the writing back then. Like, abstract ill feelings about a single line, or even a lone word.
Looking back at the feelings I remember, I was obsessive.
It's February 2025 now, and I bet that if I had actually finished those as videos, even imperfect or even outright bad ones, I would still be pleased with the writing that generally underlies the production. I have a hard time accurately conveying the gravity of how crazy fixated I was on actual minutiae. I'm talking stray lines, if not lone words.
Not only could I have put these out, but I probably would've sooner learned a lot of tricks in editing I know now, gained some momentum from having made something tangible, and I also probably would've made more, better videos. Hell, I'd probably have a small catalogue of pretty good videos by now.
Anyways, the moral of my anecdote is that the bigger a hater you are of perfection, the better.
If you've got projects big or small, get it done! And if you struggle with perfection like I do, try to set a concrete condition for what makes it “finished”; I find it's helped me pull back from abstract feelings of bad mojo somehow being allowed to completely can an otherwise perfectly good little project!