Just over two years ago, I started this website. After I’d set up my hosting plan and made the home page very pretty, it sat there, ready and waiting for my first piece of content to be published. I had hundreds of potential first blog posts ready to go, saved in an ever-growing document. All I had to do was choose one and write it up. But I was terrified of sharing my thoughts, so I convinced myself the website needed more work before it was ready for a blog – better photos, a more concise bio, a separate page for my CV – anything other than actual writing, which was the reason I had started the site in the first place. This went on for a couple years, and my website stayed pretty on the surface but empty and useless. And during that time, with each passing day, I felt like a fraud. I’d been calling myself a writer for a while at that point, but I didn’t have anything to show for it because I’d been paralysed by perfectionism. My unreasonably high standards for my work meant that my writing never actually saw the light of day – it was never good enough – and ironically, this also meant it could never improve, because I refused to put it in a position where it could be judged in any way.
I’ve finally managed to change that by embracing a commitment to adequacy, rather than aiming for perfection. The main lesson is this: if perfect is the enemy of good, then adequate is the antidote to perfect. Aiming for an ugly but useful solution drives action, because it frees you of the need to see everything work flawlessly. This isn’t about accepting work that isn’t up to scratch – this is about purposefully aiming to produce something average, because the goal isn’t to do well, it is first simply to do. In Neil Gaiman’s 2012 commencement speech at the University of the Arts (here: Neil Gaiman – Inspirational Commencement Speech at the University of the Arts 2012 – YouTube ), he says “Make good art.” I think he jumped the gun. I think the advice to people like me, who are just starting out, or who feel paralysed by fear or perfectionism, should simply be, “Make art.” Near the end of the same speech, Gaiman tells the graduates to “go and make interesting mistakes.” I think that’s more like what we should be aiming for, at least at the beginning of a creative journey. Expect to fail, expect to make mistakes, expect to learn something from them. Expect to be blindsided and disappointed and to feel completely out of control, but just try to make it interesting. The only really damaging failure here would be if you let your mistakes, or your fear of mistakes, stop you from making more. More mistakes, more art.
This suggestion of prolific output comes up again in Scott Young’s advice on becoming a writer: “don’t worry about quality until you’ve written 100 essays”. The idea is to make sure we do the thing, and then to build up to doing the thing reliably and consistently, before we start worrying about doing it well. Doing something that’s worth doing, even it’s an ugly journey, peppered with setbacks and detours and wrong turns, is far better than doing nothing, which is what inevitably comes as a result of analysis paralysis when we try to make something excellent from the get-go. We can think of this as a red pill/ blue pill moment: do you want to do the things you say you want to do, or do you just want to have done them? Or think about having done them? Or blame someone else for the fact that you haven’t done them?
If the solution to perfectionism is a commitment to adequacy, it’s because adequacy is tangible and real. It shows up and says, “this is what I’ve got, it’s not everything we wanted but it’s something, it’s a start.” But adequacy also opens itself up to criticism, by actually being visible, and this vulnerability makes it scary. What we often fail to realise is that this vulnerability, this exposure to painful criticism, is what makes adequacy so useful. Because it can improve! It’s not stuck as one thing forever. If you have an adequate first draft, a shaky understanding of a concept, a not-perfect-but-good-enough-to-get-going version of anything you’re trying to make or learn or do, you can move forward from there. It’s the first stepping stone. This is the reasoning behind the popular writing advice to write something, anything, and then come back to edit it later. Because what we manage to put down the first time we try might be absolute trash, but it’s far less daunting to edit a bad draft than to fill a blank page.
Our mistake is that we often imagine that first step going perfectly, and the journey ending there. Once we let go of that expectation, we can also let go of the suffocating notion that every word, every brush stroke, every move we make has to be perfect. We can be free from the idea that somehow, making bad art makes us less deserving of the opportunity to make art. I thought for a long time that because my writing isn’t as good as I want it to be, I shouldn’t bother putting anything up. I’d forgotten the advice of Ira Glass, who understands very well what it means to face this struggle ( Ira Glass on The Creative Process: – YouTube ).
Thankfully, I’ve embraced a commitment to adequacy rather than the unfulfillable promise of perfection. And you know what I’m doing now? Writing! And publishing, which is a massive deal. Seriously, it feels weird to be visible on purpose – at least at first, and especially on the Internet. But thanks to my lowered standards for this website, it’s up and running. Thanks to my lowered standards for my writing, I have a blog, on which I am now actually publishing work. So, I can only get better, my writing can only improve, and I can only become more and more confident putting my work on the Internet.
What I’ve found useful is a “build first, refine later” mindset. That’s how we lower the barrier to entry on just about anything we want to pursue, because it’s how we allow ourselves to make mistakes, and ugly websites, and clumsy sentences. And those are all good things, because they can be improved upon. Those mistakes can be learned from, and then next time we sit down to make something, we’ll be slightly better informed, and we’ll make slightly better mistakes, and our sentences will be slightly less clumsy. Over time, this progress will compound, and we’ll find ourselves completely at home in what once felt like a hostile wilderness.