Why Perfectionism Is Killing Your Creativity

Parking the pursuit for perfect

Housekeeping

This week I share my thoughts on something I see and hear a lot from people in the DM’s and emails and is often at the crux of a lot of inaction and frustration from artists.

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The Collective Suffering

Sometimes we think that it’s everything else that is holding us back from doing what we really want to do. Newsflash - 99% of the time it’s actually yourself that’s getting in the way, and it’s likely down to one of these three things…

• Fear

• Limiting beliefs

• Perfectionism

Or if you’re super lucky it might be all three of these at once, plus a few more thrown in for good measure.

Something that is also really important to understand about humanity, particularly creatives in the modern world, is that pretty much everyone is anxious, depressed, suffering from imposter syndrome, perfectionism, shiny object syndrome and all the other isms and dromes you can think of or google.

This either makes you feel more comfortable, knowing everyone is suffering in some way, or it makes you feel panicked that your state might not be as unique as you thought, making you feel as though you might not be able to hide behind it as much.

Obviously if you have an extreme case of any of these then your output and ability will be impacted so don’t think I’m just brushing over things here.

I’m taking about the mild to moderate intrusive thoughts that creep in when you go to put yourself out there or do a new thing. The panic and the sweats that incur when you finally take action on your dreams or the helplessness you feel when you just can’t move past a task because it’s not yet perfect.

PSA: Done is better than perfect and tbh perfect sucks anyway so replace perfect with one of these words interesting, cool, engaging, striking, unique, different, hell even weird or odd. These are all better than perfect. Perfect is like being nice, I don’t want people to remember me for being nice, I want them to remember me for being lively, funny, passionate, endearing or even crazy and a bit too much.

But nice, no thanks. And perfect, can just get fucked.

Yay! So now we have parked the pursuit for perfection we can start creating outside of an unrealistic expectation that only serves to hold us back and make moves towards what we want for ourselves.

Being Self Aware Will Save Your Life

So it’s kind of a double edged sword cause when you are self aware you are normally pretty aware in general and being aware of everything is the opposite to being ignorant and we all know that ignorance is pure bliss. Well it’s bliss for the ignorant person at least…

No state is perfect though, as we just learned in the previous paragraph, so let’s talk about the power of self reflection and how addressing your findings will set you free.

It’s highly likely that you have a pattern of behavior and those patterns rear their ugly head at certain times. Like an idea finally coming to fruition that now suddenly seems to be bloating out, taking forever and you now hate it because you are so terrified of it being finished because that means you must release it, publish it, submit it, whatever and this involves feedback and others seeing it, which makes you feel terrified and wanting to kick the can down the road even further.

Fear basically.

Fear of failure. Fear of disappointment. Fear of ridicule. Fear of success even.

It’s all delving into the unknown a little too much and that makes a person squirm which then makes you question things, pull back and put barriers up to make it harder for yourself so you never get to that point. Do you see the evil cycle that you are victim to!?

This looks like excuses about time, money, what’s the point? Or things like it’s not perfect yet I’ll change this or that or wait for the light to be like this or I’ll go over it one more time etc. STOP RIGHT NOW, as the spice girls would say, and just DO something that distracts you from those negative mantras and thoughts. Take a step towards the finished product even if it feels premature or difficult.

Overcoming this internal monologue and pushing through with the task will make you feel amazing at the end and help to retrain your brain to have this response instead of the wallowing struggling artist one.

Real life Lucy Lumen example: I sat down to write this after coming home from a shoot with another one planned this evening and I knew I had to get this done because I put it out every Friday at 6am and once I miss that I know it’s a slippery sloop. I spent about 5 minutes dicking around with the title because I wasn’t sure what I wanted this newsletter to be about exactly.

Dwelling on the title was a great way to procrastinate actually doing the thing and it also gave me loads of excuses not to do it. I’ll wait for the title to come to me or I’ll wait till I know exactly what I’m going to write first. Big fat excuses that I’m just not gonna stand for because I know that the tomorrow me is the one that will really suffer if I don’t get it done today.

So I left the title blank and just started writing and if you are hating this issue then you’ll be pleased to know it’s nearly finished!

The moral of the story is not to focus on what you can’t do, or why you can’t do it, but rather what you can do and what you can control. You can control your own actions and intentions too so don’t feel at their mercy.

A self reflection activity that is great to do is simply being mindful of your own behavioral patterns and digging a little deeper into why you might be resorting to this mindset or pattern.

Do you always feel like giving up at the end? This is normal and resistance is strongest at the end so knowing that fact should help you to compartmentalize that feeling into that self sabotaging box instead of letting it take hold.

Once you’ve named it then you know why it’s happening and you can rise above it.

Taking back the power by understanding your own mind and behavior is really a gamechanger to moving through the more difficult parts of an artistic process.

Something I notice lately is when things go horribly wrong I tend to want to blame someone or something and then instead of dealing with the unpleasant feeling of things not being how I wanted them to be I can instead get angry and that makes me feel more in control, but it also hurts others and doesn’t actually deal with the pain, it just shifts it.

So now I know that, I look out for it and instead I vocalize the fact that things happen, I can’t change it now, what have I learned and how can I move on? I mean this is in an ideal situation and it’s easier on Substack than irl so don’t think I’m this zen, accepting human being, cause trust me, I’m fucking not. And that’s okay!

Basically I’m just saying check yourself before you wreck your chances at winning at life. It’s so likely that you are the one standing in your own way and if you could just step outside yourself and look at it from that perspective you would be miles ahead of where you are now.

Rant over.

Thank you for opening and reading this newsletter. I appreciate all of you deeply and Substack is truly my favorite place on the internet so please keep coming back and reading so I am driven to post every week and we can continue these little chats.

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