Are You Waiting For Everything To Be Perfect?

Growing up you are not taught to make mistakes.  In school, the goal was to get answers right in order to get good grades so that you could advance to the next grade level.  Mistakes were seen as bad.  Your class paper would come back all marked up in red ink with a grade that didn’t reflect the hard work that you put in.  But, outside of school, messing up can be an incredible learning opportunity.

As an adult, putting work out there that is messy or not quite ready doesn’t sound like a good idea. You may find yourself paralyzed by this fear of not having everything “right” just yet.  So, you hold off on putting your work out into the world because it’s just not quite ready.  You think to yourself this doesn’t sound good or it doesn’t look right so you keep working on it.  One day it will be ready to put out into the world.  But these projects never see the light of day because they are never good enough.  This is mostly because you’re afraid of what other people will think.

Often times you’re so caught up in your own head of the fear of what other people will think that your work stays hidden and never gets put out into the world.  All because someone may judge you and give you negative feedback. Your mind starts racing with thoughts of what if someone doesn’t like it or what if it’s a complete disaster.  Your biggest fear is what will they think of you if your work isn’t good and what that means about you as a person.  Putting something out there and getting negative feedback could mean that you’re a failure.  You don’t want that to happen so you hold yourself back from sharing your gift with the world.    

The truth is, you’ll never truly learn how to improve what you’re working on if you never show it to the world.  You won’t get the feedback you need to improve.  If you just start and put it out there, you can learn.  If you keep tweaking based off what you think the project needs, the work will never be done.  You’ll always have an excuse as to why it’s not quite ready yet. 

Stop trying to make things perfect.  Be okay with messing up.  It’s a hard concept to grasp when you grew up aiming for perfect.  Especially when school taught you perfect scores on the test would give you an A.  But perfect can be subjective.  Your perfect may be different than someone else.

Instead of trying to make something perfect based off your standards, release it into the world and get feedback.  That’s the only way to make it better.  You’ll see where improvements need to be made immediately.  This will get you much closer to “perfect” than if you just sat there on it and worked on your project alone.

By sharing your project with the world you’ll gain new perspective from other people.  They may see something you might have missed and would have never seen if you would have kept everything to yourself.  But you’ll never know those things unless you put it out there.  

Be bold and put your work out there.  You’ll see where the holes are and what needs to be improved much faster than if you kept your work under wraps.  You’ll always be guessing what needs to be improved instead of really figuring it out by putting it out into the world and testing it.

Life is an experiment. It’s about testing new ideas and seeing what works and what doesn’t.  That’s how you advance in life.  You make it messy and test!

Successful people know that the more mistakes they make the more success they will have.  All because they continue to learn and improve for next time.  Put your work out there and get the feedback you need and make changes.  Stop hiding behind excuses of it’s not quite ready yet all because you’re afraid of what other people will think.  Make it messy and avoid waiting for everything to be perfect.