perfectionism, part three: consistency

“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.

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.”

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.