I have noticed that I have a problem with perfectionism that prevents me from getting things done. In this post , I am going to talk about how I am going to try to deal with perfectionism and hopefully the method can help you as well.

Isn’t perfectionism a good thing?

Perfectionism can be a good thing in moderation but for many people, it can slow down or prevent forward progress in what they are doing. I know that I have the bad kind of perfectionism because I have been wanting to add videos to this site for a while and I have recorded a couple of them. They were decent videos but to me , they weren’t good enough to post. If I had posted them I would have made many more videos along with them and my video making skills would have improved. But because those videos weren’t perfect to me I wasn’t able to improve.

Art and Fear pottery class story

This is a story I saw in the book Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland.

In this story, there is a ceramics teacher who announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Create something purposely imperfect

After hearing about this story I decided that I needed to make a change in the way I go about making videos.

I can’t keep trying to make perfect videos without finishing them because they don’t match up with my standards.

So instead I am going to try to do the opposite from now on. I am going to make videos that are purposefully imperfect. Hopefully , I will improve my skills quicker than I would have before.

Conclusion

If you also struggle with perfectionism that has a negative impact on your life, Then I challenge you to also create/ do something that is purposefully imperfect.

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