Solving the Paradox of Perfectionism
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I wake up.
My cat, Oreo, has been pawing at me insistently, letting me know it's time for her breakfast.
I get up, feed her, go through my morning routine, and sit down to work.
"This is it," I tell myself, "I need to do [thing]."
I open my laptop, fully intending to do [thing], then find myself getting caught in a whirlwind of distractions.
Checking all four of my email accounts. Checking the Kortex Slack. Checking my two Telegram accounts. Checking social media. Checking my email again for good measure in case there's somehow been an urgent issue I need to attend to.
The cycle repeats.
Before I know it, I've spent (wasted?) hours "checking in", and it's then time to get on calls. Kortex Engineering meetings, Kortex University trainings, personal business stuff. A meal here, a cuddle session with Oreo there, and another round of checkins...
Morning quickly becomes afternoon quickly becomes evening. Now I'm mentally fatigued.
Oh wait - I committed to walking 15,000 steps a day, every day, which is about two and a half hours of walking on my treadmill. I can work a bit while walking, but it's hard to write while you're moving, so I usually just read a book. Lately I've been reading books about how to be a better COO/CTO for my team at Kortex.
I finish my steps for the day. Now I'm physically fatigued... and it's almost time for bed.
I started my day telling myself it's time to do [thing]. I fully intended to do [thing]. I wholeheartedly want to do [thing]. But I never got around to doing it. And so, like so many other days, another ends without me even starting [thing].
I go to bed, feel disappointed in myself, fall asleep... and the cycle begins anew the next morning when my furry little alarm clock digs her claws into my shoulder.
This has been the cycle I've found myself in for months. The [thing] has been things like:
- Writing content for Twitter (where I have my largest following)
- Writing a script for a Youtube video
- Writing an email for my newsletter
I want to do these things. I need to do these things. I constantly think about these things. But I don't do these things.
I post half-baked tweets at 11:58pm just to keep my Twitter account from being totally dead.
I assembled a quality audio/video setup for Youtube but I only use it for Zoom calls.
I haven't sent a newsletter since July of last year.
So, you may be wondering, if these things are so important to me... why haven't I done them? At first glance, you'd think my problem is time management, and so the solution is to make a schedule. I've done that. Multiple times. It never works.
The real reason I put off such things is perfectionism.
The Paradox of Perfectionism
I believe, deep down, we all want to do a good job at what we do - even when what we have to do isn't something we really care about doing.
For example, back when I was in college, I wanted to get good grades, even in the classes I didn't care about.
But an interesting thing always happened in my classes: I'd procrastinate. This happened whether I cared about the class or not. I'd fully intend to work hard, do my best, and get good grades... but then one way or another I'd find myself putting things off until the last minute.
Isn't it interesting how motivating a deadline can be?
I had a realization about this back in 2022. At the time, I was running my friend Dakota's ghostwriting agency, writing 20 threads and 200 tweets for our clients on an average week. I somehow kept up this workload for about a year.
I didn't like ghostwriting. Writing has always been hard for me. Writing for other people was even harder. It was stressful to have the success of someone else's brand (literally) in my hands. The content I wrote could make or break a client's revenue, momentum, and reputation.
Even though I didn't like the act of ghostwriting, I still wanted to do well at it. I wanted our clients to love the content, get good results from it, and come back to us for more.
But I always procrastinated about writing content for our clients. Like clockwork, I'd put a client's work off until right before it was due, and then write an entire month of content in two or three days of focused work.
The work would be high quality, the results would be good, and the clients would be happy.
Yet I still beat myself up. I knew I could've done even better work if I had started earlier. I vowed to do so for the next batch of writing... and then the cycle would repeat again.
Why did I keep procrastinating? Because I wanted to do well but I never felt like I was "ready" to do well.
Do it in the morning? I'm not awake yet, so I can't do it well right now, so I'll do it later.
Do it in the afternoon? I have calls, so I can't do it well right now, so I'll do it later.
Do it in the evening? I'm tired, so I can't do it well right now, so I'll do it tomorrow.
A constant cycle of "I want to do well, but I feel like I can't do it well right now, so I'll do it later when I feel like I can do it well."
The next day the cycle begins anew - unless I'm up against a deadline. The magical thing about a deadline is you no longer have time to say "I'll do it later because I want to do it well." You have to do it now and deliver what you can regardless of the quality.
Then you think to yourself "I would've done better if I started earlier..."
But the next time around, you don't feel like you can do it well, and so you put it off til later to a time when you will. That time never comes, of course, and so you find yourself scrambling to meet another deadline.
It's always the same thing. Work for my classes, for my clients, for my own brand. Regardless of the work, I'd always want to do well, but I'd always put it off waiting for the magical state of existence where I'd feel like I could do well.
The paradox of perfectionism is this: Waiting for perfection leads only to procrastination. So what can we do?
Imperfect Action Beats Perfect Inaction
The hardest thing to face as a writer is a blank page (or, in our modern age, an empty tweet prompt). The only way to edit a blank page is to start writing.
I didn't plan this email out. I decided on the topic late last night. I started writing it about an hour ago. Since I started writing, I've been riding the waves of words coming out of my fingers, doing the most creative thing I've done in months.
I just glanced at the time. 10:31am. I promised Dan Koe (the guy who pushed me to send a newsletter today) that I'd send this off by 11:00am.
He's one of my main inspirations as a creator. In fact, he just launched his first book this week, and I had the honor of writing the foreword to it. I highly recommend checking it out (no affiliation).
Is this email perfect? Of course not. It's basically a first draft. I could've written it better if I planned it out, wrote it across multiple sessions, and gave it a final edit to polish it.
I'm not going to do that for this email. I'm going to finish it, read it aloud once (to my cat who is sleeping next to me), and then send it to you. Next time I'll start drafting earlier so I can create a better finished product.
I wanted to share my experiences of perfectionism-based procrastination with you. If you often procrastinate (like many of us do), I hope this gives you insight into a potential reason why you do it.
Even more importantly, I hope the next time you find yourself putting something off because you don't feel like you can do it well at that moment... you decide to sit down, open the blank page, and write out your own rough draft.
Getting to perfect is hard. But the only way to ever even get close to perfect is by starting with imperfect.
Even if you never reach perfection, at the end of the day, imperfect action always beats perfect inaction.
Go take imperfect action today.
Thank you for reading,
Joey Justice
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