“A good thesis is a done thesis.” This is the phrase my graduate school advisor repeated to me over and over (and over, and over, and over) while I was doing my research and writing my two master’s theses. While writing my first thesis, I was knee deep in coffee mugs and dirty dishes by Friday night (spent at home in front of my computer writing of course) and I would hear Todd’s voice in my head each time I rewrote a sentence for the fifth time because it just wasn’t quite right. The message was clear: done is better than incomplete. You need to finish and get into the workforce so make sure you get the damn thing done.
I am so grateful that message was repeated enough that it not only sunk in while I was in school, but that it’s stuck with me now years later as a mantra I can call on. I’m grateful because it helps me battle my “perfection monster” even though I’m long past my days of thinking an 8:00AM class was so early and writing about research results.
It’s in a loving way I refer to my own perfectionism as a monster because I do recognize the benefits of perfectionism (because of course, everything has multiple shades of grey). Here are just a few pretty cool things I like about my perfectionistic edge: I write pretty darn good first drafts because sometimes sentences are written five times (or more) until I love them. I don’t end up with little chunks of leftover food on my dishes after they’ve gone through the dishwasher because I thoroughly scrape and rinse them before they go in. And I practice like a mo-fo until I get a skill just right – I credit being a perfectionist to having been a great college athlete because I wanted to get the footwork just right… and everything else for that matter. There are good things about being a perfectionist!
But there are also downsides, and if you’re reading this my guess is that I’m preaching to the choir. Personally, the biggest downside for me has been that I never quite feel good enough when I fall even a bit short – and I’m human, so this happens frequently in life, like, almost daily! Another compounding problem here that I’m confident my fellow keepers of perfection monsters will find familiar, is that I set my goals too high. When my daily to-do list runs the whole length of a page, then I subconsciously tell myself that’s where the bar is set, and if I accomplish every item on my list except one, I know which unchecked box is going to have me reaching for another glass of pity wine. There’s nothing wrong with setting high goals – if you never set them high, you’ll certainly never reach them! But the issue I’ve faced is setting unrealistic goals that become expectations, then when I don’t meet these (unfair) expectations, my perfectionism picks up the big stick of shame I’ve handed it and wails repeatedly on the mental dent I’ve worked on for years.
So how do we take back control of the stick? I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes I need a good mental whack to the brain, but sometimes is the key word in that sentence! And certainly not for when I forget to charge my laptop the night before. Here are a few of my tricks I use to re-wield the stick of shame:
- Embrace Shitty First Drafts
Another phrase accompanied my advisor’s sage words while I was in graduate school is shitty first drafts, and it comes from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Have you ever faced a blank page and gotten a little pit in your stomach? Knowing where to begin, developing the perfect first line, or thinking of a good story to kick things off can be paralyzing – and this is where Anne’s suggestion comes in handy. Just write the damn thing and don’t think about it until you’ve got words on the page. Then come back to it. Get the juices flowing because it’s so much easier to return for edits than get it just right, right out of the gate.
This works in areas of life outside of writing, too. It applied to me blogging just this week! As I’m building my first blog, there is a lot I don’t know and a ton of decisions to make. There are pathways to create, organization and titles, pictures! Oh, crap this thing needs pictures! I have a strong urge to make sure all these things are done and perfect before pushing my blog out into the world – but instead, I’m writing a couple of posts and getting them published in categories with names I will likely change in the future. That’s OKAY! I can come back, because this is my shitty first draft of the blog that will get better with time. Can I tell you a secret? When I first published this post it wasn’t even done…