Month: February 2016

perfectionism, part three: consistency

February 24, 2016 / / 1 Comment

“Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.”   –Mark Twain

A huge part of what stunts creative work is the feeling that we need to do perfect work instead of prolific amounts of work. In last week’s post about procrastination as it relates to perfectionism, I compared this to taking continuous steps rather than making a single, intimidating leap. There are habits creatives can adopt to keep on a consistent schedule of creating and keep that daunting beast of perfectionism at bay.

Routine

Many highly focused people, especially creatives, maintain consistency by creating rigid daily routines. My grandfather was very routine-driven. Every evening he would shave, shower, and get into his pajamas. Then he would fix himself a small stack of cheese and saltines, which he ate while he made his to-do list for the following day on a pocket-sized memo pad. During his lunchtime, he would check off what he had done so far that day, then revisit the list in the evening. If anything wasn’t done, he carried it over to tomorrow’s list. He knew exactly what needed to be done the next day, so he could just wake up and start doing them without having to waste time deciding where to start or devising a plan of action. He created momentum for getting things done every day because his consistency eliminated any guesswork for what would need to be done when he showed up to the tasks every morning.

Having too much freedom can invite paralysis. Narrowing your focus ahead of time makes tasks easier to check off your list, so you will be more likely to accomplish them. Eliminate as many choices as possible so you’re not overwhelmed, and be specific about your to-do list for the next day. Having tomorrow’s tasks in mind when you go to bed allows your subconscious to mull it over all night and wake up in the morning with a fresh perspective.

Don’t Break the Chain

Developing a consistent habit keeps you from crashing and burning when you just don’t feel like showing up. Jerry Seinfeld is credited with the technique of “not breaking the chain.” In short, if you want to be motivated to improve at something, mark off on a calendar each day that you’ve shown up and done that thing. Once you see a chain of marked off days, you won’t want to see an unmarked day on the calendar. You don’t want to see that you’ve broken your promise to yourself. You want to keep the chain going as long as possible. Once you break one link, it’s easy to let yourself break another one. The longer the chain, the more motivated you’ll be to keep it going. Show up every day to maintain momentum and keep Resistance at bay. Say yes every single day to the activity that’s most important to you.

Often like begets like. When I start writing, I get ideas for several more things I want to write about. That creates an idea snowball. Conversely, if I skip a weekly post or my daily writing, it’s way too easy to let myself flake out on consecutive days. Want momentum and endless ideas? Keep the yes going.

Practice, Practice, Practice

If you haven’t read the book Art and Fear, please stop reading and go buy it or check it out at your local library. You can read it in a couple of hours and it will change your life. In it, we are told the parable of two groups of ceramics students. One group was to be judged solely on the quality of their work, the other on quantity. While the quality group focused their efforts on creating one perfect pot, the other group turned out so many iterations that they got really good at it. Because they had so much more practice than the quality group, the quantity group ended up producing a higher quality.

clay-pots-jodhpur

There’s an old Chinese parable along the same lines. A king commissioned an artist to paint a picture of a rooster. After a year, the artist had still not come through with the painting and the king complained. The artist painted him a perfect rooster on the spot. The king responded, “If you can paint a perfect rooster in five minutes, why has it taken so long for you to give me this painting?” The artist shows the king to his studio, where there are stacks of thousands of rooster paintings. He tells the king, “It has taken me a year to be able to paint a perfect rooster in five minutes.”

rooster2

When we get hung up on perfectionism over just showing up and practicing consistently, we can miss the big picture. We get better by doing. Rarely will our work be up to our own standards, but we can only hope to excel by doing it thousands of times. Ira Glass states it nicely:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

It’s not a matter of choosing either quality or quantity. Quantity begets quality. Don’t let perfectionism keep you from producing work that may not meet your standards. Don’t make perfectionism your goal; you can only hope to get any closer to it by producing lots and lots of (probably bad) work. Every work you treat as practice is another step further in your growth as a creative.

Consistency Defines You

Here’s a related thought from an earlier post about permission :

Consistency is what gives you permission to call yourself something. You can call yourself whatever you want; it’s what you actually do that people will notice and identify you by. Who you are isn’t defined by whether or not you’re getting attention, or if somebody picked you out of a lineup of other people vying for attention, or somebody telling you that you’re good enough. You are what you consistently do…when you show up every day, you are showing up to the same world as everyone else, but you are showing up with your story.

What you do on a consistent basis is what identifies you to others. The work that you do the most is what sets you apart.

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perfectionism, part two: procrastination

February 17, 2016 / / 1 Comment

You’ll go further taking one step every day than you will staring at the chasm you intend to overcome in a single jump.

The other day as I was reflecting on procrastination, I had the thought that maybe procrastination isn’t about caring too little about something to see it through. I believe the opposite is often true, that it comes from caring so much that we get paralyzed by the idea of not completing it to the perfect level that we had hoped to attain (see part one).

Identity and romanticism

It may be a combination of that and caring more about the peripheral consequences of not finishing the thing you’re putting on hold. I care so much about writing, but I don’t do it as regularly as I ought because I’m afraid of it not being perfect. Of course it will never be perfect. But I do it because I said I was going to, because I want to be a writer, and because when I do it I feel like I’m in my element.

The consequences of not writing include letting myself down, falling back on my promise (explicit or not) to my readers to post every week, and putting my reputation at stake. In school, my grades and diploma were at stake, in addition to my identity and reputation among my peers and professors. It can be very daunting when doing what you love feels like it includes holding your identity in the balance.

Practice

Rarely do we think of the consequences of procrastinating. Generally, there’s just an overall guilt of not doing that thing. When I do remember how silly it is to put off doing something I love or to which I (for better or worse) attach my identity, I have to remember that I only get better with practice. It’s stupid to be paralyzed by perfectionism. That next thing that you’re going to do is just one of many thousands of iterations you should be performing to hone that skill. Always strive for excellence, but it’s absurd to expect to sit down and turn out a masterpiece in one shot.

Each member of an orchestra tunes up and practices before each performance. They don’t just show up and play a note-perfect symphony. Excellent musicians practice constantly. They stay sharp by practicing scales and rudiments every single time they pick up their instrument. They don’t become virtuosos by thinking scales are something they learned as a kid and therefore don’t need anymore. Proficiency is only possible with practice. The same is true for athletes, painters, actors, singers, writers, newscasters, carpenters–literally any skilled person became skilled because of repetition.

Not every painting that every famous painter did was their piece de resistance either. The great ones in anything showed up to their work every day. Sure, they were probably perfectionists, too. But those who excel at what they do only got to that level because they overcame that mental hang-up and just did it over and over and over again. They probably hated even their best works.

The less Art there is in painting, the more painting there is. –Picasso

Just keep doing your craft and the next thing you make will overshadow the last thing. When you sit down to do your work, remind yourself that this is not your Guernica or Sistine Chapel. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you create something. Everything has been done, but anything you do will have your unique spin on it. Put in your time doing the rudiments in preparation for the good work that will come out of you. But get over the idea that you have to turn out your masterpiece.

Picasso said, “the less Art there is in painting, the more painting there is.” In other words, quit thinking everything you do has to be a significant piece of art and just shut up and do it. The more you romanticize the medium, the more you’re likely to be too intimidated to do it. (More on that in a later post.) Forget about external judgments, definitions or standards lest they leave you too overwhelmed to even start.

Picasso averaged at least two paintings per day in his lifetime. How many of those were ever seen by anyone but himself? Jimi Hendrix, who only lived to the age of 27, made around 70 albums. Mozart composed over 600 pieces in his lifetime and certainly wasn’t famous until later in life. Charles Schulz created nearly 18,000 Charlie Brown comic strips before he died. You better believe they all practiced their craft every day without fail and weren’t paralyzed by the thought that each next thing had to be their masterpiece.

Expectation

You’ve heard it said that sometimes people spend their whole lives with their masterpiece still in them because they were afraid to try; or what’s just as disappointing, they obsess so much about creating their one big thing that they miss the fact that they might have already succeeded. Maybe you were so focused on what you thought it would be that you already created what the world sees as your masterpiece, but you didn’t see it because it didn’t come about how you’d imagined. Instead of a singular piece, it came about as the result of practicing and doing your work every single day. Maybe a work you’ve already done resonated with someone, or simply your dedication to doing the work consistently resonated with someone.

A closet full of unused canvases is a huge waste compared to the small amount the paint “wasted” on what you might think is a failure of a painting. But you practiced. A blank page is sadder than a bad poem. Every artist has done loads of bad work before they became masters. The common denominator is that every single day they shut out the negative inner voice that told them they weren’t good enough and did it anyway.

The longer you wait to do something, the more you build up in your head and hold it to an unattainable standard. The ten unedited journal pages your write for your eyes only have more value than the book you intend to write. The small steps taken to hone your craft are valuable and help add up to the greater works ahead.

You’ll go further taking one step every day than you will staring at the chasm you intend to overcome in a single jump. Don’t be so intimidated by the distance that you don’t make that first step. That step itself may make a difference to someone, and it will certainly build momentum in your skill.

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perfectionism, part one: paralysis

February 10, 2016 / / 0 Comments

If not knowing what you want to do with the rest of your life paralyzes you so much that you don’t create at all, that’s not only settling for mediocrity but it’s also a complete waste of your uniqueness. You say no to joy any time you expect something to define your life path.

I’ve lately begun to confront a glaring truth in my life: as long as there’s a substantial obstacle or thing to be done, I can ignore everything else until that thing is taken care of. I can tell myself that I don’t need to deal with X until after Y, where X can represent anything vying for my attention, and Y can represent any of the “shoulds” in my life such as painting, finishing a book I started, vending at a craft fair, taking a class, or even writing a blog post. The biggest Y for me currently is figuring out what specific skills I should hone down in order to freelance. I keep the fact that I don’t know what to niche down and focus on like a dangling carrot perpetually in front of me, because as long as I don’t know what exactly I should be doing, I don’t have a responsibility to work specifically toward that goal. It’s a perennial excuse. As long as there’s one thing hanging over my head, I can ignore other problems in my life. It’s so silly.

The plank in my eye that prevents me from pursuing my life calling—or career, passion, or whatever you want to call it—is my indecision. The absence of a clear, unmistakable sign from the universe telling me what one thing I should be doing with my life is the excuse I keep in my pocket that allows me to wash my hands of the responsibility to show up every day and work hard at something specific outside of my day job. Being wishy-washy allows me to continue being wishy-washy. If I half-heartedly pursue several of my interests, I can just coast on a cushion of hobbies for the rest of my life. I can enjoy all of them and not feel pressured to excel at any of them, all the while feeling a pang of guilt that can never be truly ignored.

All of this is procrastination on a larger scale, which stems from perfectionism, which itself is likely an offshoot of a fear of being wrong. Many of us don’t start something because we have this perfect idea of the outcome that we’re afraid we won’t attain. We’re uncertain that we’ll be able to live up to our own standards or that we’re taking the right path.

We are so afraid of going the wrong direction that we go nowhere.

The resulting guilt from knowing in your heart that inactivity is even worse than making a mistake perpetuates the cycle of paralysis. Instead of moving forward through the mistakes that will make us better and take us in a more positive direction, we wallow in guilt and fear of failure. It’s a vicious cycle that can be broken by repeated failure, otherwise known as practice.

There will always be a voice telling you to pick something, to do better, to find purpose; and that same voice will tell you there is no purpose, that your work doesn’t matter, that you’ve chosen the wrong path, that nobody cares. You’ll be stuck in an infinite loop of self-sabotage until you learn to ignore the voice of Resistance. You quiet that negativity and doubt by showing up, even if you don’t know yet what exactly you’re showing up to do. Preparation and willingness to create invites the muse to come in and play and banish that voice that ridicules your desire to be something.

[Guilt and fear] is a vicious cycle that can be broken by repeated failure, otherwise known as practice.

It’s amazing how often we creative folk need to be reminded to just create every day. Just do something every day that you enjoy doing. That doesn’t have to define your life and you don’t have to figure out how to make that thing you enjoy into a career. In due time that may reveal itself, but in the meantime just show up and do what makes you happy.

Don’t settle for mediocrity. Being daunted by the fact that you haven’t found a box to put yourself in seems utterly ridiculous if you really think about it. If not knowing what you want to do with the rest of your life paralyzes you so much that you don’t create at all, that’s not only settling for mediocrity but it’s also a complete waste of your uniqueness.

You say no to joy anytime you expect something to define your life path. Can’t you just write because you like to write? Paint because you like to paint? Just play with some medium because you find it fun? If you want to make a thing, for heaven’s sake make that thing because it brings you joy.

Don’t try to figure out how you’re going to sell that thing or worry if people will understand that thing or if there’s a career path for making that thing. Just make the damn thing and call it good because that was where the muse called and you answered. You showed up. You showed up and made a thing and it was fun. Do it again tomorrow. Do it again for the next 363 days after that and see if you’re still holding that stick with a carrot in front of yourself.

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