Perfectionism = Self Sabotage
“What would I do if I didn’t have to do it perfectly?” — Julia Cameron
I once told a friend: “Writing could be a lot easier if I stopped trying so hard.”
This was a clever way of saying that I’m a perfectionist who gets in his own way. But when those words came out of my mouth, I realized that perfectionism is actually a covert form of self-sabotage.
When I look back on my childhood, one of the sneaky scripts I had to unravel was this idea that “anything worthwhile requires suffering.” In high school, I spent most of my time doing only two things: Tier 1 travel hockey and honors classes. I was an actual student athlete. But I didn’t have enough awareness to see that I didn’t enjoy it after a while, in large part because I never got enough sleep, which made me sick. I was always that guy in class who couldn’t stop sniffing. As I reflect on the high school grind and even some of the past jobs that I’ve had, I guess I was convinced that life had to be a struggle—as if things couldn’t be easy or effortless.
This even transferred to writing, which comes naturally to me. I believe that I was born to be a writer. Every morning, I write in my red Leuchtturm 1917 journal. I feel like I could do it all day. If you came over to my apartment, you’d see a bunch of 4x6 notecards scattered all over the place with quotes. I probably have some kind of disorder with how many notes I add to my Evernote every day. I am obsessed with ideas.
But then when I sit down to write for real, I noticed this feeling of having to perform. As if writing online were different than writing for myself. Historically, I think I’ve made it harder on myself than it had to be because I believed that it was too good to be true for things to be easy. When it came to creating, I thought that I had to struggle to make something great. For whatever reason, I thought that the ideas in my notes or in my journal were not “good enough” ideas to write about. I thought that I had to write about certain topics or only limit myself to one-sentence paragraphs to keep a modern reader engaged or to follow all kinds of rules that were created by people in a game where there aren’t really any rules except for being yourself.
Writing Isn’t Hard!?
A lot of people say that writing is hard. I disagree. While it might be true for many people, it’s never helped me to believe such a thing. Sure, reading and writing are in my nature, but by telling myself that something is hard, I will naturally make it harder than it has to be. Likewise, if I believe that my life is a struggle, then I will weirdly find it hard to be myself.
Instead of just copying and pasting my notes into a Google Doc and starting to write, I tend to make excuses for not creating. Stuff like, “Oh, I just need to read one more book before I can write about that. I don’t have enough material.” And while there is something to be said about reading a lot to develop a well-rooted world view, I know that in my case it’s actually a self-sabotage driven by ego and always being somewhere where I am not.
As Julia Cameron wrote in her brilliant book The Artist’s Way:
“To the perfectionist, there is always room for improvement. The perfectionist calls this humility. In reality, it’s egotism. It is pride that makes us want to write a perfect script, paint a perfect painting, perform a perfect audition monologue. Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough—that we should try again . . . A book is never finished. But at a certain point you stop writing it and go on to the next thing. A film is never cut perfectly, but at a certain point you let go and call it done. That is a normal part of creativity—letting go. We always do the best that we can by the light we have to see by.”
Piano
When it comes to writing, I actually think I could write waaaaaaay more stuff but I don’t because I have this silly idea that it has to be “perfect” or that I have to come up with these shocking insights. But the thing I had to realize is that a lot of the things in my notes and just who I am as a person are cooler than I think I used to think.
For example, I invited two of my friends over to my apartment after dinner this week. After showing them a tour of my bookshelf, I played some songs on my piano. After playing the theme song to The Office, one of my friends was like, “Wow. That’s such a cool skill that you can learn any song you want.” And I just thought to myself, “Huh, that’s interesting. I’ve been able to play piano for years. That’s something so obvious about myself that other people see as amazing.”
In other words, creativity is not about becoming but about being. It’s an act of surrendering to who you are right now. Sure, people say that all the time, but I had to write this essay to really realize it. Easy can be enough.
As the musician India.Arie once said:
“If you create the game
Then you create the rules
And if you just be you
There’s no way you can lose”
Knowing that perfectionism is ego, I’ve adopted an affirmation that I read in my journal every day: “Writing comes naturally to me. It is safe for work to be easy.” It’s just like the question that Tim Ferriss likes to ask himself about anything he does in life: “What if this was easy?”
This post is proof. This morning, when I was doing some deep reading of Marshall McLuhan on my blue couch, I got struck with that random braingasm where ideas connect. Oh yeah, baby. Then I sprung up to open my laptop and quickly made a bunch of bullet points in a Google Doc. Normally though, I’d wait for a few weeks to write about it. But this time, I changed my mind and jumped on the Muse and realized that I could write an article about this on the spot because I do have everything that I need. I don’t need to find another quote about perfectionism or ego to know what I know and to say what I need to say, and I have to trust that creativity will take care of itself—if and only if I sit down to write.
Today, I felt massive Resistance to writing and really didn’t want to sit down at my desk. I already spent four hours on Airplane Mode, battling with The Gutenberg Galaxy and breaking my brain with ideas about how the phonetic alphabet and the printing press changed human consciousness. But after doing a nice little NSDR, I sat down to get ‘er done. Then the hypnotic trance of writing took over. Something came out. That something was this essay.
I wrote this to celebrate what happens when we follow through with our own ideas and trust the content of our own minds. Things can be easy. Things can be jolly. Writing can be as graceful as a walk in the woods. In the past, I probably would’ve spent another four or five days pondering this post, but I’m going to publish it pretty soon before I fly home to visit my family in Colorado for Christmas. By writing an essay like this and barely trying at all, I now know that it’s safe for things to be effortless. This makes me wonder more about a question I read from Julia Cameron: “What would I do if I didn’t have to do it perfectly?”
Greatly relate to this one Baxter. Great essay!