Seeking Perfection
I recently started cutting another old video (of course, what's new 😛) and for some reason this project took so incredibly long. The video is only 2'40s and half the duration of my Nothing Else Matters Video. I kept feeling like it wasn't good enough, and there was just so many things to edit, colour and sync 😪Even after completing all of that, I just kept finding little things to do. And I wonder if I was finding these because I wasn't satisfied, or if I was just too obsessed with getting it perfect? 🧐
/side note the video is actually Perfect by Ed Sheeran and I swear that I am not writing this article to be funny/
The best is the enemy of good - Voltaire
I always have a problem of thinking that something isn't good enough. And that's true and great for so so many things - ✅striving for that excellence in my harp playing, ✅ attaining good grades and ✅achieving results when I really need to.But unfortunately this also holds me back from so so many things because I keep nitpicking. I would not release my recordings, my sheet music, my writings because I just think it can be refined so much more. 👩🏻💻I think: "Good can always be better." And so I keep preparing, managing and fine-tuning but never publishing it.
If we keep focusing on making something perfect, we will never take action 🏌🏻♀️In order to find the "perfect workout plan", we will read tons of research and diet plans. But we never actually get to doing it because the research is not done, so the plan is not good enough 📝And if I start now, it will definitely go wrong because the plan is not good enough, right?
🛑Stop preparing. At a certain point, perfection starts to torture us because it's honestly impossible to achieve. Perfection will never come. And if we really think about it, it doesn't really matter 🤷🏻♀️Wouldn't it be better to spend that 30minutes reviewing that project that you've reviewed 100 times on something else instead? 🧠Wouldn't it be better if you just published that work, forgot about it and focus your brain on something else?
Sure, make that 1 thing as good as you can. 🕰But give yourself a deadline and when you reach it, publish that article! Send out that recording! Consistently producing work will allow you to learn and make continuous progress. I would never know certain aspects of video editing if I just kept "perfecting" 1 video. 🎞 My skills would develop only from continually working and completing 200 videos. But if I just stop at 1 because I want to get something perfect, I will always be stuck at 1.
Perfect is impossible. Even as a perfectionist myself, I know it's impossible and it's a mindset that I am trying to overcome. Instead of driving yourself absolutely 🌰nuts, take action. 🚵🏻♀️ My ideas and projects are useless unless it exists in the world. And if I only fret about perfection, none of my projects will.
To watch that old-video-which-I-cut, here is Perfect by Ed Sheeran (Harp Cover)
xx, lishan