Below are my favorite excerpts and quotes form creativity books about perfectionism. Enjoy!

Art and Fear

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the" quantity" group: fifty pounds of pots rated an " A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an " A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the" quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work-and learning from their mistakes-the" quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Create or Die

The final 20% is when you’re approaching the finish line. Maybe you need a few finishing touches, but for the most part, it's ready. That's not what the voice in your head is telling you, though. This phase is when the voice realizes that it has only one final move left to defeat you. It uses the fear of the unknown: Will people like it? Is it ready? How can it be better? These questions force you into a never-ending perfection loop. The best way to respond to this attack is by giving yourself a deadline. Say, "I'm finishing this in the next thirty days," and stick to it. It's also important to note that finishing, in this instance, goes hand in hand with sharing. Finishing your song means releasing it on all streaming platforms. Finishing your book means listing it on Amazon. Finishing your painting means sharing it on social media. Lee Unkrich, the director of Toy Story 3, is famously quoted saying, "We don't ever finish a film. I could keep on making it better. We're just forced to release it."

Finish

What was astonishing to me is something that should be more apparent to all of us: the exercises that caused people to increase their progress dramatically were those that took the pressure off, those that did away with the crippling perfectionism that caused people to quit their goals…The less that people aimed for perfect, the more productive they became.

—

They haven’t and they won’t. If you want to finish, you’ve got to do all that you can to get rid of your perfectionism right out of the gate. You’ve got to have fun, cut your goal in half, choose what things you’ll bomb, and a few other actions you won’t see coming at first.

—

While researching this book, I asked a thousand people in an online poll if they had ever refused to even write down an idea because they judged it as not good enough. I thought maybe I was the only one who had a perfectionism filter that sorted ideas before they were allowed to hit a piece of paper. More than 97 percent of the participants said they had done that. I don’t know how to tell you this, but your goal will not be perfect. It crushes me to break this to you, but you will fail. Maybe a lot. Maybe right out of the gate. You might even trip over the starting line.

—

The harder you try to be perfect, the less likely you’ll accomplish your goals. I know that feels backward, but that’s what the research says over and over again. I wish that were enough to quiet that ever-present demon, but perfectionism is not so easily vanquished. It’s far more persistent than that. It digs deeper into our subconscious and is not so easily removed. Throughout this book, we will return to perfectionism as our ultimate villain. Perfectionism will do its best to knock you down when you work on a goal. At every turn, it will kick you in the shins, steal your lunch money, and fill you with doubt.

Big Magic

It starts by forgetting about perfect. We don’t have time for perfect. In any event, perfection is unachievable: It’s a myth and a trap and a hamster wheel that will run you to death. The writer Rebecca Solnit puts it well: “So many of us believe in perfection, which ruins everything else, because the perfect is not only the enemy of the good; it’s also the enemy of the realistic, the possible, and the fun.” Perfectionism stops people from completing their work, yes—but even worse, it often stops people from beginning their work. Perfectionists often decide in advance that the end product is never going to be satisfactory, so they don’t even bother trying to be creative in the first place.

—

The most evil trick about perfectionism, though, is that it disguises itself as a virtue. In job interviews, for instance, people will sometimes advertise their perfectionism as if it’s their greatest selling point—taking pride in the very thing that is holding them back from enjoying their fullest possible engagement with creative living. They wear their perfectionism like a badge of honor, as if it signals high tastes and exquisite standards. But I see it differently. I think perfectionism is just a high-end, haute couture version of fear. I think perfectionism is just fear in fancy shoes and a mink coat, pretending to be elegant when actually it’s just terrified. Because underneath that shiny veneer, perfectionism is nothing more than a deep existential angst that says, again and again, “I am not good enough and I will never be good enough.”

—

Or, to paraphrase: A good-enough novel violently written now is better than a perfect novel meticulously written never. I also think my mother understood this radical notion—that mere completion is a rather honorable achievement in its own right. What’s more, it’s a rare one. Because the truth of the matter is, most people don’t finish things! Look around you, the evidence is everywhere: People don’t finish. They begin ambitious projects with the best of intentions, but then they get stuck in a mire of insecurity and doubt and hairsplitting . . . and they stop.

—

So if you can just complete something—merely complete it!—you’re already miles ahead of the pack, right there. You may want your work to be perfect, in other words; I just want mine to be finished. I could sit down with you right now and go through each of my books, page by page, and tell you everything that’s wrong with them. This would make for an incredibly boring afternoon for both of us, but I could do it. I could show you everything that I elected not to fix, change, improve, or fuss over. I could show you every shortcut I took when I couldn’t figure out how to more elegantly solve a complicated narrative puzzle. I could show you characters I killed off because I didn’t know what else to do with them. I could show you gaps in logic and holes in research. I could show you all kinds of sticky tape and shoelaces holding those projects together…In short, I’d worked on that novel tirelessly for four years, had given it a tremendous amount of effort, love, and faith, and basically I liked it the way it was…And do you know what happened when I released my admittedly imperfect book into the world? Not much. The earth stayed on its axis. Rivers did not run backward. Birds didn’t drop dead out of the air. I got some good reviews, some bad reviews, some indifferent reviews…In conclusion: A whole bunch of people had some opinions about my novel for a short while, and then everyone moved on, because people are busy and they have their own lives to think about. But I’d had a thrilling intellectual and emotional experience writing The Signature of All Things—and the merits of that creative adventure were mine to keep forever. Those four years of my life had been wonderfully well spent. When I finished that novel, it was not a perfect thing, but I still felt it was the best work I’d ever done, and I believed I was a far better writer than I’d been before I began it. I would not trade a minute of that encounter for anything. But now that work was finished, and it was time for me to shift my attention to something new—something that would also, someday, be released as good enough.

Creative Confidence

In other words, to ultimately reach a creative breakthrough, you just need to start, regardless of small failures that may occur along the way. It’s unlikely that your first try at anything will be a success. But that’s okay. It’s hard to be “best” right away, so commit to rapid and continuous improvements. The messiness of such trial and error may seem uncomfortable at first, but action allows most of us to learn at a faster rate; it’s almost a prerequisite for success. Otherwise, the desire to be best can get in the way of getting better.

—

A clever ceramics instructor divided his pottery class into two groups during the first session. One half of the students, he announced, would be graded on quality as represented by a single ceramic piece due at the end of the class, a culmination of all they had learned. The other half of the class he would grade based on quantity. For example, fifty pounds of finished work would earn them an A. Throughout the course, the “quality” students funneled their energy into meticulously crafting the perfect ceramic piece, while the “quantity” students threw pots nonstop in every session. And although it was counterintuitive to his students, you can guess how his experiment came out: at the end of the course, the best pieces all came from students whose goal was quantity, the ones who spent the most time actually practicing their craft.

—

It is a lesson applicable to a much broader range of creative endeavors: if you want to make something great, you need to start making. Striving for perfection can get in the way during the early stages of the creative process. So don’t get stuck at the planning stage. Don’t let your inner perfectionist slow you down. All the overplanning, all the procrastinating, and all the talking are signs that we are afraid, that we just don’t feel ready. You want everything to be “just right” before you commit further or share something with others. That tendency leads us to wait rather than act, to perfect rather than launch.

Creativity Inc.

There is an alternative approach to being wrong as fast as you can. It is the notion that if you carefully think everything through, if you are meticulous and plan well and consider all possible outcomes, you are more likely to create a lasting product. But I should caution that if you seek to plot out all your moves before you make them—if you put your faith in slow, deliberative planning in the hopes it will spare you failure down the line—well, you’re deluding yourself. For one thing, it’s easier to plan derivative work—things that copy or repeat something already out there. So if your primary goal is to have a fully worked out, set-in-stone plan, you are only upping your chances of being unoriginal. Moreover, you cannot plan your way out of problems. While planning is very important, and we do a lot of it, there is only so much you can control in a creative environment. In general, I have found that people who pour their energy into thinking about an approach and insisting that it is too early to act are wrong just as often as people who dive in and work quickly. The overplanners just take longer to be wrong (and, when things inevitably go awry, are more crushed by the feeling that they have failed). There’s a corollary to this, as well: The more time you spend mapping out an approach, the more likely you are to get attached to it. The nonworking idea gets worn into your brain, like a rut in the mud. It can be difficult to get free of it and head in a different direction. Which, more often than not, is exactly what you must do.

The Artist’s Way

Tillie Olsen correctly calls it the “knife of the perfectionist attitude in art.” You may call it something else. Getting it right, you may call it, or fixing it before I go any further. You may call it having standards. What you should be calling it is perfectionism.

Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right. It has nothing to do with fixing things. It has nothing to do with standards. Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop—an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole. Instead of creating freely and allowing errors to reveal themselves later as insights, we often get mired in getting the details right. We correct our originality into a uniformity that lacks passion and spontaneity. “Do not fear mistakes,” Miles Davis told us. “There are none.”

—

For the perfectionist, there are no first drafts, rough sketches, warm-up exercises. Every draft is meant to be final, perfect, set in stone. Midway through a project, the perfectionist decides to read it all over, outline it, see where it’s going. And where is it going? Nowhere, very fast. The perfectionist is never satisfied. The perfectionist never says, “This is pretty good. I think I’ll just keep going.” To the perfectionist, there is always room for improvement. The perfectionist calls this humility. In reality, it is 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. No. We should not. “A painting is never finished. It simply stops in interesting places,” said Paul Gardner. 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.

—

In a sense, no creative act is ever finished. You can’t learn to act because there is always more to learn. Arguably, you cannot even direct a film because you will always be redirecting it, even years later. You will know then what you might have done and what you will do next if you keep working. This doesn’t mean that the work accomplished is worthless. Far from it. It simply means that doing the work points the way to new and better work to be done.

—

Do not call procrastination laziness. Call it fear. Fear is what blocks an artist. The fear of not being good enough. The fear of not finishing. The fear of failure and of success. The fear of beginning at all. There is only one cure for fear. That cure is love. Use love for your artist to cure its fear. Stop yelling at yourself. Be nice. Call fear by its right name.

The Creative Act

While the emotional undercurrents of self-doubt can serve the art, they can also interfere with the creative process. Beginning a work, completing a work, and sharing a work—these are key moments where many of us become stuck. How do we move forward, considering the stories we tell ourselves?One of the best strategies is to lower the stakes. We tend to think that what we’re making is the most important thing in our lives and that it’s going to define us for all eternity. Consider moving forward with the more accurate point of view that it’s a small work, a beginning. The mission is to complete the project so you can move on to the next. That next one is a stepping-stone to the following work. And so it continues in productive rhythm for the entirety of your creative life.

—

When you believe the work before you is the single piece that will forever define you, it’s difficult to let it go. The urge for perfection is overwhelming. It’s too much. We are frozen, and sometimes end up convincing ourselves that discarding the entire work is the only way to move forward. The only art the world gets to enjoy is from creators who’ve overcome these hurdles and released their work. Perhaps still greater artists existed than the ones we know, but they were never able to make this leap.

—

The imperfections you’re tempted to fix might prove to be what make the work great. And sometimes not. We rarely know what makes a piece great. No one can know. The most plausible reasons are theories at best. Why is beyond our comprehension. The Leaning Tower of Pisa was an architectural error, which builders further exacerbated by trying to fix. Now, hundreds of years later, it’s one of the most visited buildings in the world precisely because of this mistake. In Japanese pottery, there’s an artful form of repair called kintsugi. When a piece of ceramic pottery breaks, rather than trying to restore it to its original condition, the artisan accentuates the fault by using gold to fill the crack. This beautifully draws attention to where the work was broken, creating a golden vein. Instead of the flaw diminishing the work, it becomes a focal point, an area of both physical and aesthetic strength. The scar also tells the story of the piece, chronicling its past experience.

The Creative Habit

Another trap is the belief that everything has to be perfect before you can take the next step. You won’t move on to that second chapter until the first is written, rewritten, honed, tweaked, examined under a microscope, and buffed to a bright mahogany sheen. You won’t dip a brush in the paint until you’ve assembled all the colors you can possibly imagine using in the course of the project. I know it’s important to be prepared, but at the start of the process this type of perfectionism is more like procrastination. You’ve got to get in there and do.

The Practice

Perfectionism has nothing to do with being perfect.

—

And the last type of good, the one that distracts so many who engage in the process, is the feeling that comes from creating a monster hit. A piece of work that crosses over from the core audience to a much larger one. This is the bestseller list or the line out the door. This is the TED talk with forty million views. Chasing this elusive sort of perfection is a challenging task, because the numbers are stacked against you (many entries, few winners). It also puts a lot of focus on outcomes, instead of on the practice. That means that because most of the time you won’t go viral, it’s worth producing work you’re proud of, even if you don’t have a hit in the end.

—

Good needs to be defined before you begin. What’s it for and who’s it for? If it achieves its mission, then it’s good. If it doesn’t, then either you were unlucky, incorrect, or perhaps, what you created didn’t match what you set out to do. And yes, there’s a huge gap between “good” and “as good as it could be.” It’s likely we’ll never bridge that gap.

—

You won’t run out. This isn’t your one and only shot. There’s no perfect idea, just the next thing you haven’t shipped yet. No one is keeping you from posting your video. No one is keeping you from blogging every day. No one is keeping you from hanging your artwork. The only way to get through the steps is to do the steps.

How to Fly a Horse

What determines whether we will succeed as creators is not how intelligent we are, how talented we are, or how hard we work, but how we respond to the adversity of creation.

On Writing Well

Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it’s where the game is won or lost. That idea is hard to accept. We all have an emotional equity in our first draft; we can’t believe that it wasn’t born perfect. But the odds are close to 100 percent that it wasn’t. Most writers don’t initially say what they want to say, or say it as well as they could. The newly hatched sentence almost always has something wrong with it. It’s not clear. It’s not logical. It’s verbose. It’s klunky. It’s pretentious. It’s boring. It’s full of clutter. It’s full of clichés. It lacks rhythm. It can be read in several different ways. It doesn’t lead out of the previous sentence. It doesn’t … The point is that clear writing is the result of a lot of tinkering.

War of Art

The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance … Late at night, have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who doesn’t write, a painter who doesn’t paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.

The Accidental Creative

The “conception” and “birth” of our ideas are small bookends to the real work of creating—the process. Eventually, if we stick with it, we will have a finished product. The “birth” of our idea as a finished product is the end result of a very long process and, as with a newborn, rarely looks like what we imagined it would. The process often takes us to new and unexpected places in our work.

—

Similarly, many creatives have a lot of great ideas but are ineffective at execution. They never “ship” because they are too busy obsessively perfecting and tweaking their ideas. To be prolific means that you not only have great ideas, but that you actually do something with them. You can’t be bound by insecurity and neurosis. You must ship if you want to thrive.

The Icarus Deception

The only person who saw every single Jerry Garcia performance was Jerry himself. The only one who has seen every memo you’ve written and every meeting you’ve been to is you. It’s pretty easy to pick out your worst performances ever and compare them with the best your competition has ever done. Easy, but pointless. Your best work is a gift. Of course your work can be improved, but it is a gift first. Your generosity is more important than your perfection.

Steal Like an Artist

A wonderful flaw about human beings is that we’re incapable of making perfect copies. Our failure to copy our heroes is where we discover where our own thing lives. That is how we evolve.

Bird by Bird

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a sh**ty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it. Besides, perfectionism will ruin your writing, blocking inventiveness and playfulness and life force (these are words we are allowed to use in California). Perfectionism means that you try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived. Clutter is wonderfully fertile ground—you can still discover new treasures under all those piles, clean things up, edit things out, fix things, get a grip. Tidiness suggests that something is as good as it’s going to get. Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation, while writing needs to breathe and move.

Change by Design

Although I would love to provide a simple, easy-to-follow recipe that would ensure that every project ends as successfully as this one, the nature of design thinking makes that impossible. In contrast to the champions of scientific management at the beginning of the last century, design thinkers know that there is no “one best way” to move through the process. There are useful starting points and helpful landmarks along the way, but the continuum of innovation is best thought of as a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps. We can think of them as inspiration, the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions; ideation, the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas; and implementation, the path that leads from the project room to the market. Projects may loop back through these spaces more than once as the team refines its ideas and explores new directions.

Creative Quest

So what is the answer? What’s the better approach for getting started down the creative path? Should you plan and plan before you dive in, or dive in and take pictures of the splash? In the end, I can only answer correctly, which is to answer with a bit of a compromise: you should plan and plan and plan but never forget to leave a little opening in your plan for the human element. Something that sounds robotically perfect, something that is airless, isn’t going to connect with an audience and might not even connect with you as an artist in the moments after you make it. You want proof of life.

Stay creative,

Way Walker