Finishing the work

Playing the perfectionism game and a dedication to showing up messy

I’ve been using a lot of excuses for not writing. For me, writing is a solitary and focused activity, one that I — frankly — don’t always make the time for. I could say that I don’t have the time for it, but we all have time. We are just choosing to set aside time for other things. Those things might be necessary within a season of our lives, but they are a choice.

A fact that sits with me often is that the word “priority” isn’t meant to be plural. We aren’t meant to have multiple of them. As of recent, I’ve been seeking to work on about a million different things at once. I have many irons in the fire, doing incremental work on projects but not gaining any real traction on any of them.

In reality, I actually write a lot — but it generally manifests itself as messy notes on my phone, a mix of half finished sentences. My Substack drafts are full of half-baked post ideas, marked with bullet points and incomplete sentences. Some are full of nuggets of wisdom, and some make me curious what I was thinking about when I wrote it. All of them are incomplete and imperfect.

My drafts were very inspired in late February. Maybe one day I’ll come back to these.

I have ideas for pieces of writing that I’ve had for months — and in some cases, years. Ideas rattle around my brain nonstop, and the lack of finishing an idea has allowed them to fester and expand to the point of perfectionism. I’ve had so much time and capacity to dream that they’ve become a rosy, perfect idea — one that’s impossible to measure up to.

Writing is messy and by nature, imperfect. There’s objective rules about grammar, and structure, but the actual content is subjective. By letting the ideas marinate for too long, it becomes a feeling of too much, a feeling of a lack of priority. Perhaps one thing is taking the lead, but other focuses water it down. It’s a sensation of clutter, of having too many tabs open. Slowly, I lose my place, can’t focus, and it’s impossible to find the thing I was attempting to focus on.

We’ve reached a level of universal experience that this shirt is sold at Target. Source

What’s the balm for perfectionism? Well, taking action. And that’s scary. In writing, it mean capturing the moment, a sliver of time that may be great work, or it may not be. It may be a captured opinion or work that you cringe at later, or look back on and say “woah, that was good.” And there’s no real way to know for sure unless you capture it.

Hoarding information only gets you so far before taking action is necessary to empty the brain. So empty it. Create something imperfect, something that may not age great. But maybe it will. Maybe you’ll be shocked by how good it is. And even if it’s not, it’s a memory captured. Let’s finish the work. No matter what it is — and maybe even share it with some other people.

And also, even if we don’t share the work — perhaps we can give ourselves credit for what we did do. I’m proud of you. I hope you can learn to be proud of yourself, too.