25 April 2017
By Cory Watson
Do you struggle with perfectionism? I do. Perfectionism has been killing me for years.
I have been refining my writing — again and again — trying to fix every little problem. In a desperate effort to avoid embarrassment, I hid my work away — and all I got was this stupid embarrassment over accomplishing so little.
My gut says I need to hide — Embarrassment will destroy me.
Lies.
Fear of embarrassment will destroy me.
Embarrassment itself? Let it hit me as hard as it can. Bring it on! Cowering in fear might work as a short-term solution — not a lifestyle.
So I understand the problem. But…
…Understanding a problem is not the same as finding a solution. It’s only step one. So — for step two — I’m going to try a strategy, and you can feel free to try it with me.
There’s an easy answer for perfectionism. Mess up on purpose.
Give up completely. The only way to destroy your uncertainty is to certainly play the part of a fool.
But what if we just look like a fool — and then it still doesn’t solve our perfectionism?
Worst-case?
We can let everyone believe that our accidental mistakes were intentional ones. (There will be some accidents. Let’s not lie to ourselves. But maybe an elaborate cover-up operation is just what our fragile egos need.)
The key is having a playful attitude:
“Did I misspell my own name? Oh, how silly of me. Now why would I do that?”
Make sure everyone knows you’re going to make harmless mistakes on purpose.
And make sure your intentional msitakes are truly harmless.
If you’re creating something to represent a whole group of people, then you’ll need the group’s permission to use this strategy, and that’s a whole other problem.
If you are allowed to try this strategy, pick msitakes that won’t hurt or mislead anybody. Pick mistakes people will recognize as mistakes, or mistakes everyone can freely overlook.
Examples:
If you intentionally mess up spelling, try to keep the shape of the word the same. Avoid changing the beginning or ending and try not to swap tall letters with short lettres.
If you intentionally mess up computer code —
Wait, hold on!
Don’t mess up your code!
Code needs to be correct, efficient, and readable. You shouldn’t break any of these three things intentionally.
But you won’t always have a choice. Someday your priorities will clash. What if the efficient solution is unreadable? Well, then you should include comments to explain why your code is hard to read. Explain what it does and why efficiency was your top priority.
See? You need to protect your code’s readability even when you’re forced to use an unreadable solution.
There’s simply no room for intentional mistakes in code.
Well that tangent was awkward and out-of-place.
I’m going to make one or more intentional mistakes in every post I write for this blog. Now I never have to worry about being perfect.
Fantastic! Perfection was a stupid thing to worry about. Perfectionism was ironically an obstacle to perfection. An obstacle which I have now cleared, bringing me one step closer to perfection.
I think I missed the point.
Tags: techniques