How perfection is ruining my career (and my life!)

I don’t know how you feel about being perfect. Sure, it is impossible, but that was not the question. How do you feel about being perfect? It bothers me. It bothers me so much that I get days where I can’t focus because of a mistake I have made or a design that just does not work or something I have said. I aim for perfection in all areas of life. And it is ruining not only my career, but also my life.

Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.

Salvador Dali

I especially hate failing at paperwork. I hate making mistakes. I can’t stand it if my quote or my invoice is not perfect. Even more so, my work. It needs to be perfect – for my client and for me. Now, there is the issue – what’s perfect for you is not necessarily perfect for me. Kill the white space! Kill the white space! They scream and shout at me. (Ok, not really, but dude, allow me to paint my version of it!) I am in a white space phase. No background, no detail. Give. Me. Empty. Or yellow, but only a little square at the bottom.

So how is it ruining my career? Surely aiming for perfection is a good thing? Yes, of course it is. But not when you are pressed for time. In fact, most of the time I am just wasting time trying to find something to align. (That is one lame sentence rhyming.) What could have taken me an hour, takes me an hour and a half. And don’t think I charge for the extra half an hour! It is not my client’s fault I am OCD. (Watch this space for a post about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.) I need to find fonts that are perfect. Perfectly shaped A and O and R that are all the same height and aligned at the bottom, not too high to appear distorted, nothing. It must be perfect. I count: shift + left arrow. One. Two. Three. Second object: shift + right arrow. One. Two. Three. It is tiring and at the end of each project, I am exhausted. It takes me at least twenty minutes to get back on track with the next thing on my to-do list. In short, aiming for perfection is not only making me lose valuable time, but it also makes me take things more personally when changes are required. And finally, knowing that I will never reach the level of perfection I am aiming for, upsets me enough to consider a career change.

On a personal level, I doodle and do creative projects quite often. Sometimes I decide not to begin a project because of my fear of failure or imperfection. It sounds so stupid writing all of this and I realise how ridiculous it actually is, but in my mind, it matters. I’d rather stop halfway through a project and burn it than struggling to fix it. If only I could stick to the quote below and accept things as they are.

Every great artist has a closet full of bad paintings.

I have no idea who exactly said this

At the beginning of the year, I decided to celebrate the small wins instead of having a new year’s resolution list I will not stick to. On new moon, I set my intentions for the next two weeks and on full moon I look back and see how things went. Then I LET THAT SHIT GO. Blow it to the moon and spend the next two weeks getting over it and deciding how you can learn from it. On February 4th new moon I decided to let go of perfection. Yeah, right, like that is happening. I am writing this blog post, not because I have time to vent. In fact, I am way behind as is. I am writing this in hopes of inspiring you to do the same. Or to at least feel better while you are wasting time trying to get things perfect that there is some human sitting on this chair wasting time to get things perfectly imperfect too. “Completion before perfection”… I read it twice in the past couple of months. Also, as I am writing this, I know that my blog is not live. So you will only read this later. Why? Because (a) my blog is not complete yet and (b) it is not perfect either. It will never be, but hell, I should at least try in terms of my own expectations.

Also, I know the featured image is not perfect. But I need to run now. I am crushing a deadline here.

Chat soon.