LCN 030: Bust Perfectionism with the Imperfectionist Manifesto

Are you a perfectionist? Do you find yourself holding back, not doing things, because you know they’ll never be as good as you wish? There’s a better way! Listen to find out what life is like on the other side.

This episode is inspired by my original Imperfectionist Manifesto blog post, in which I tell a story of a musician I admire. The man’s chops are off the charts, but sadly, he despises his own work, and would love to recall every CD he ever created.

It made me so sad to realize that instead of enjoying his talent, he was tortured by his perfectionism (as I have been most of my life).

This got me thinking, and I came up with five maxims that ultimately formed the seed of my Imperfectionist Manifesto poster (below), and which I elaborate on in the podcast episode, and the blog post that inspired it:

• Even if you can’t stand what you’ve created, you never know how it may affect somebody else.
• Ultimate value doesn’t always have anything to do with technical skill
• Putting stuff out into the world is really gratifying
• Allowing yourself to be imperfect is a helluva lot more fun
• The more you let yourself be imperfect, the more stuff you’ll actually do, and the better you’ll get at it

I conceived of the idea of a poster when I wrote that initial post, back in 2011. The poster, however, took me two and a half years to create because of (wait for it) perfectionism!

Thankfully, I eventually realized that it was perfectionism/fear of not being good enough holding me back, and that I could practice imperfectionism in the creation of the poster! 🙂

(For more backstory on the making of the poster, and the troll who flamed me for it when I shared in-process pics, click here.)

Click on the image below to download my manifestos poster for free!

Resources Mentioned in this Episode

California Coast Music Camp

This American Life’s Ira Glass description of the creative gap:

Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo. (See Ira’s full-length video (~5 mins) on YouTube.)

 

Thanks for Listening!

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Now go get creating!

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