The Perfect Page
Written by Wendi Kelly - March 19, 2010 1 Comment
Today I am writing a post that is only good enough. Just good enough. Not perfect, not knock-it-out -of the ballpark spectacular, not breath-taking and certainty not the best post I have ever written.
I just started writing and let the good enough words say what I need them to say and be done with it. Because if I didn’t do that, chances are I would continue to sit here and stare at the blank page until magically perfection came and filled its emptiness with perfect prose.
And I think we all know that Hell would freeze over before that magic day came.
A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault. ~John Henry Newman
Once in awhile I become afflicted with a serious case of perfectionism. It comes over me like a virus. It used to be a more lifelong affliction that I thought I was cured from, but now and then it rears its ugly head and sneaks back in gripping me with its insidious paralysis.
The good news is that because I have been working on it for so many years now I can usually pick up on the signals pretty quickly.
Like the fact that I suddenly had the urge to clean the baseboards in my house with a toothbrush this week and rearranged a good amount of my furniture because the angles seemed all wrong. And got annoyed because none of the forks in the silverware drawer would stay lined up properly. ( Not that they do any other week but usually it slides over my head without a care in the world.)
And the fact that I threw four posts in the delete pile because they all sounded terrible to my picky ears.
Bouts of Perfectionism cause me to stumble into the land of ”Not good enough to be successful.”
It takes my self talk into a nose dive, giving way too much power to that nasty voice that argues with me that “There is no point in writing, nobody cares, no one is listening and oh by the way…do I really have anything all that important to say anyhow that hasn’t already been said?”
Well I might not. I don’t know. But I do know that if I don’t speak, if I don’t write, if I don’t push through and ignore that badgering voice, then it is a certainty that I will not have had anything important to say- Because I will not have said anything at all.
Perhaps today all I want to say is that it is more important for me to be persistent then perfect. That I know I have to push through the emotion that I am not good enough, that I am not perfect enough and realize that though I may be feeling it-
THE FEELING IS A LIE.
We are all good enough.
We are not perfect. But if we are persistent, if we keep on going, if we keep on writing, having faith in our goals, stepping up to the plate even when we don’t feel like it, even when we can’t see the vision or the purpose or don’t feel we are worthy to be heard…we will be successful.
Persistence will win over perfection every single time. Why? One is a myth. And the other one is one of the most powerful weapons you will ever use.
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One Outstanding Response to "The Perfect Page"
maquis on March 19, 2010 at 11:08 am | Permalink
Wendi, I have been thinking about this a bit recently. I’m curious how you cope with this problem if you see others around you that are “better” at whatever you’re working on? For example, if you go to someone’s house and it seems like everything is perfect, or whatever. This is something I’ve been struggling with, and I haven’t yet figured out how to push off the situation where I look at someone else and think “She’s got everything the way it’s supposed to be. Why can’t I even get close?” That completely stops me cold, and I end up getting more and more frustrated.