Choosing Bad Output

When I started my current job, I took a DiSC personality test. My personality type came back as Perfectionist. This wasn’t a surprise to me, but it did get me thinking a lot more about perfectionism and how it’s affected me.

I view perfectionism as a negative trait. The other labels this test offered were things like Creative, Objective Thinker, Promoter. Perfectionist, as far as I’ve seen, was the only type that is objectively unattainable. They might as well have just labeled me delusional.

Perfectionism has slowed me down a lot throughout my life. Take this blog, for example. I’ve felt called to do this for 10 years, but things as simple as choosing the right name for the site or getting the color scheme and style of the site perfect have impeded progress. There have been countless instances where creative projects have either never started or have come to an abrupt halt due to my need for perfection.

I think there can be benefits to a perfectionist personality, as long as it comes with a healthy dose of self-awareness. Having high standards is great, as long as you know that what you’re doing will never actually be perfect. A desire to be thorough and create high-quality work is never a bad thing. You just have to know that what you’re really looking for is “good enough.” There has to be a moment where you stop tinkering, stop perfecting, and simply put the work out into the world. What good is a high standard if you never actually create anything? 

Times where I’ve taken a “good enough” approach have been some of the most fruitful. The first and most important case that comes to mind is having children. My wife and I decided that our position in life was good enough to start a family. Had we waited for things to be perfect, we’d still be childless with too many pets.

I’ve tried to understand where those perfectionist tendencies come from. Is it just a natural tendency, or is it the product of trauma? I felt an immense amount of shame growing up, around nearly every aspect of my life: how I looked, where I lived, my parents’ relationship, my speech impediment. The list is long. 

No doubt — shame influenced how I approached creative work. I felt like I needed my work to be perfect to make up for all the ways I was so unbelievably flawed. But more importantly, I didn’t want to put any creative work out there because I wanted to make myself as small as possible to avoid the attention. That’s a whole other post to explore.

A funny thing about perfectionism is that it’s never actually helped me to be more thorough. It’s just caused me to procrastinate until I can’t put the work off any longer, and then I create mediocre work with the little time I have left (if I create anything at all). This creates a cycle in which I validate my shame and the need to tinker longer or just stop altogether.

I value my high standards and my desire for constant improvement. I know not everyone is wired that way. As long as I’m working and creating, it’s okay to want my work to be as good as possible. The issue only comes when a desire for perfection stops me from creating altogether.

So at this point, I think the best way to combat my perfectionist tendencies is to practice putting work out there that I know is anything but perfect. I need to spend far less time on a project than I’d like, giving myself a cap of how long I can work on something, and then putting it out even if I hate it.

I have to actively choose to put out a completely stripped-down website with a very basic look instead of spending weeks noodling with the design. I have to be more willing to create something I think is bad than to not create at all. Ideally, I’ll still be creating work I’m proud of, but for the sake of defeating the perfectionist demons, I’m choosing bad output over another decade of no output.

DiSC has since changed its system and no longer provides those types of personality labels. Now they just focus on the DiSC assessment (I’m an SC, btw). I think it’s best if I do the same, and ditch the association with the term perfectionist. I set high standards for myself, and I strive to meet them. Part of those high standards is actually creating work, not having dozens of half-started projects in my Google Drive. Some pieces will be bad, some will be great, but either way they’ll exist.