Do you ever feel like you’re in an endless loop of tweaking, improving, and perfecting, yet you’re never really making any real progress? You’re not actually moving forward. The truth is that perfectionism is actually just a sneaky form of procrastination. Let’s break down the why and the how to get past it.
Perfectionism Masks a Fear of Failure
When we try to be perfect, we want to be perfect because we don’t want to fail. And technically, it’s not that we don’t want to fail. It’s that we don’t want to fail in front of other people. So we try to make things perfect, and actually, the fear of judgment from other people is what’s keeping you from starting. Perfectionism becomes an excuse for inaction.
The pursuit of perfection actually prevents real progress. When I restarted my YouTube channel, I wanted things to be perfect, but I resisted that because I knew I would never actually get it started. I delayed it for over a month trying to figure out how to batch things and get everything to work well. But I realized I was just procrastinating. So I cut it out, decided to launch, and made a commitment to what I was going to do.
I committed to two videos a week, every week, for five years. That’s a long time. That’s a big commitment. But I know that the only way to actually do that is by releasing imperfect videos. That being said, I’m obviously going to give them my best and try to make them as good as I can, and over time they’ll get better and better.
But the person who actually takes action, even imperfectly, many times over is so much better off than the person who’s trying to do one big thing and takes the same amount of time to do it.
Think About It This Way
Do you think you’d be better off spending three months trying to figure out the best way to make one presentation, doing all the research, perfecting every detail, and then presenting it once at the end? Or would you be better off making a presentation once a week, every single week? It could even be the exact same presentation every week. And then at the end of those three months, you give it again. Which presentation do you think is going to be better, especially if the one done just once at the end was never presented before anybody before?
The answer is obvious. There is value in making progress and not trying to make something perfect to begin with. Those three months are going to pass one way or the other. You can either spend them doing work, progressing, iterating, and making things better, or trying to make things perfect and releasing at the end. And a lot of times, that “end” never comes.
The Myth of Being Ready
Perfectionism is just a mask for a fear of failure. And the second thing holding people back is this whole myth of being ready.
There’s no such thing as being perfectly ready. Waiting for that perfect moment is just a delay tactic. Successful people launch and then improve based on feedback.
Think about something like space flight and being a rocket scientist. Think about Elon Musk who launched SpaceX. If you think something has to be perfect, shooting a rocket in the air might be the ultimate example. Yet even Musk wasn’t going for perfection out of the gate. Obviously he wanted to be as successful as possible, but he knew he had to actually run tests and iterate. There’s only so much you can do from a simulation standpoint. He launched knowing that a lot of his first rockets would fail, and many of them did. It almost cost him the entire business. But he was able to get a rocket to launch without exploding, and of course SpaceX has done fantastic things since then. If he had stopped and said, “I’m not going to proceed until I’m actually ready,” SpaceX would have never gotten off the ground.
Progress Over Perfection
80% done and launched beats 100% perfect but not launched. Here’s the key: it’s never going to be 100% perfect. Things change over time, and what you think is perfect today won’t be perfect tomorrow anyway.
It’s better to be 80% complete (or even less), make progress, get it launched, get feedback, and iterate. That’s when you get closer and closer to perfection over time. But you’re not going to come out of the gate perfect.
You need to embrace imperfection as part of growth. Failure will happen. And if you fail often and fail early, that helps you know how to change and tweak so that you can actually become closer to perfect as time goes on. Consistent action leads to better results than perfectionism ever will.
Reed Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, famously said that if you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, then you waited too long to launch. When LinkedIn was first launched, it had many imperfections. But Hoffman chose progress, getting feedback, and improving the platform over perfection. That process is what actually led to massive success and resulted in Microsoft buying LinkedIn.
Perfectionism is just another way of delaying action. Don’t let the fear of imperfection prevent you from achieving your goals. Progress is messy, but it’s the only way to get closer to the success you actually seek.
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