When "Perfect" Keeps You from Taking Action

Provincetown Harbor at dusk

Today I’m wrestling with perfection, and how it sometimes stops us from taking action. I’m not talking about the saying “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” I think that mantra is helpful if we’re close to finishing a project and we don’t know if it’s good enough to be declared finished.

Instead, I am talking about the tendency to put too much pressure on ourselves before we even begin a project. The pressure prevents us from acting.

I decided to write about this because it’s a tendency that I see in my coaching clients and–of course–in myself.

As I wrote about previously, I started working with a coach to help me develop a plan and goals for my creative work, which right now is photography. A lot of the work she and I are doing is identifying and eliminating–or at least minimizing–the blocks I have with moving my creative goals forward.

A long-standing challenge for me is creating a website for my work. Other artists who I talk to–and who are doing the kinds of things I want to do, like show in a gallery–say I need a website if I want to stand a chance of making that happen. I have a SmugMug site, which by now is dreadfully curated and mostly just an archive and file back-up system. I want to create a site that is more refined and selective–and allows me to do some blogging about my work and the things I experience when out shooting.

Over the past 12 months, I have attempted a number of times to create such a website, yet have failed to actually produce one. I can come up with many reasons why:

• I get bogged down in the technicality of the website (even using templates gets complicated with portfolio pages).

• I get overwhelmed at the sheer number of photos I have to pick from (I’ve taken almost 10,000 in the last three years; a small fraction are worth sharing, but that’s still hundreds of photos).

• Even if I could pick them, I freeze when thinking of how to organize them.

• And, of course, maybe I just don’t know how to explain myself as an artist.

In a recent coaching session, I was telling my coach (Jo) about all these challenges. After I got done explaining making excuses, she said “Jeff, do you want your website to be perfect?” As a tried and true Best Little Boy in the World, my response to her was, “Yes, of course!”

She said, “And what is a perfect website?”

I said, “One that looks great and represents who I am.”

“Jeff, what does it mean for those things to be perfect?”

<dead silence>

I was busted. That standard doesn’t actually exist. For one thing, art is subjective (I may even argue that most things in life are subjective). For another, websites can and must change all the time (again, like most things in life). It’s not one-and-done–and it can just be 10 photos to start, and nothing more than that.

Something similar happened in a coaching session where I was the coach and not the client. In this case, the client–who is a very senior leader of a government agency (and who ok’d me sharing this anecdote)–was struggling to commit to a creative writing class. The schedules weren’t quite right. One class required too much homework (he’s busy!) and another not enough (he needs some practice between classes!). He expertly shot down every option. “I just want to find the perfect fit. I don’t have a lot of free time and I don’t want to waste it,” he said.

I pushed him on what it meant for a class to be perfect, beyond making sure the basic logistics and cost worked. Does reality allow for something like a class to be perfect? Even if he found one that he felt was perfect, we can’t wave a magic wand and make the experience itself flawless. I reminded him that he can’t control how the teacher shows up or teaches, or who else is in the class and how they participate, or whether he’ll actually be able to commit all the time he wants to.

He resisted my feedback, and chose instead to keep shooting down the options he had researched.

So I kept asking, “And what else?” Clients love to hate (and ultimately hate to love) this question, which comes from Michael Bungay Stanier. It’s a good way to push someone–or yourself–to go deeper on why you’re thinking, feeling, or doing something. I was relentless, and it worked.

My client eventually admitted that being a writer was his dream, and by pursuing the class now in his late 30s meant that he had failed to move toward achieving his dream–and by admitting this he was acknowledging the lack of fulfillment he got from his current career. His job was rather fancy and one he sought for several years, and he came to me because once he got the job he wasn’t excited about it. In fact, he felt sad and trapped. (He first raised taking a writing class as one way to maybe find some joy.)

Once these meaty topics were on the table, we could help him figure out what to do about them. As he moved through those conversations with honesty, he was able to commit to a writing class. He came to see that moving toward his dream was essential for him, and that taking the course was the next step in that process. The class itself wouldn’t make him into a successful writer or mean he was instantly done with his current job–nor would it mean he had wasted time in his current career. The class was simply a way to bring something he wanted into his life, and to better understand what fulfillment really might mean for him. It didn’t have to be loaded down with anything more than that.

For me and my website, Jo made me see that I was afraid of failure. It was that simple. If I did the website and didn’t get into a gallery, what did that say about me? My work? This thing that I care so much about? What would people think about me?

I came to realize that although failure was an option, I still loved the work of photography and that being in a gallery or not wouldn’t change that. And that I wouldn’t have just one shot at doing so. Most importantly I saw that if I didn’t do the damn site I’d never have the chance of moving forward in a way that felt important to me. So why not do it? Plus, she gently reminded me that no one is paying as close attention to me as I am, so chances are no one would notice or care if I didn’t get into a gallery anytime soon.

I’m now much closer to having that website done than ever before. And I will get it done before the end of the year.

If you’re struggling to actually do something (not just deciding whether to do it; deciding is the easy part), take a step back and ask why. Most of us know rationally that perfection is an illusion–if you stop and think about it, it is almost always subjective and changing.

If you’re spending more time worrying about doing something perfectly rather than actually Doing The Thing, you need to figure out what’s really going on. Talk it through with a friend, family member, coach, or therapist.

Do the work on you and then do the work you want to do. Often, it’s really that simple.