Self-oriented perfectionism1 can be odd. On one hand, it pushes you to hold yourself to ridiculously high standards, and on the other it convinces you that nothing you create is ever good enough to share. It’s not about external validation – you’re not really looking for people to approve or applaud what you do. Instead, you’re in this constant battle with yourself, fine-tuning, tweaking, and second-guessing, because you know it could be better.
I’ve been stuck in this cycle for a while now (easily for over a decade). My laptop and hard drives are full of creative projects – half-finished websites, unpublished essays, photos, videos, and things that I was certain could be the next big thing that have since been created by others. But instead of putting them out into the world, they just sit there where I left them, quietly gathering metaphorical dust. Then, I have my physical creations that are literally gathering dust.
And the very few projects I’ve put out? I never actually told anyone about them. Not a sound on my socials or to my network. There’s one thing I don’t even recall telling my wife about2. I really just launched them into the void and said, "Alright people, if you stumble on this, cool. If not, that's cool too."
In case you're curious: the people have not stumbled on them, but that's cool.
While I tell myself I don’t care about external recognition, it’s ironic how tightly I hold onto my work. The fear isn’t about what others might think. It’s about me thinking:
What if this doesn’t live up to the standard I’ve built in my head?
I convince myself I’m just waiting for the right moment. That moment never comes because perfect is a moving target, always out of reach.
The downside of this perfectionist mindset is obvious: your work never sees the light of day, so neither does its potential. Is there an upside? I think it shows that you care about what you’re creating. You want it to be great. Greatness isn’t built in isolation though. You refine it through feedback, iteration, and even a little bit (and sometimes a lot) of vulnerability.
So I’m going to shift my perspective3. I want to stop thinking of sharing as a judgment call on whether something’s ready and start treating it as part of my creative process. Sharing won’t be something that happens at the end, it’ll be the middle.
With that being said, this post might be another one that I quietly save to my folder of “things no one will ever see.” Baby steps, right?
But maybe sharing this is the first of those baby steps.
We’ll see.
Footnotes
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Self-oriented perfectionism means pushing yourself to be perfect and setting super high expectations for what you do. People with this trait feel like they have to meet these high standards to feel good about themselves or see themselves as successful. They’re often their own toughest critic. ↩
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To be fair, this was very early in our relationship. ↩
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The embarrassing thing about this is that I wrote something earlier in the year in which I talk about how I'm shifting my approach to sharing. It's unpublished, of course. ↩