Perfectionism Paralysis can be Beaten by Half-Assing It

A lot of us suffer from perfectionism paralysis.

What is perfectionism paralysis? It can rear its ugly head in a few ways.

The first is when we become obsessed with making something we’ve produced perfect. We won’t declare it finished, or release it into the world, until we’re satisfied with it.

But since nothing is ever perfect, we can never complete it. We end up endlessly tweaking it, never gaining the fruits of our labor, and never moving on.

The second is when the paralysis moves a bit more in the literal direction. We reach a point where there’s some aspect or improvement we want to make to a project, but we aren’t quite sure how to do it in the perfect way.

Rather than doing it in a “good enough” way so we can move on and finish, we just stop, never move forward, and never complete the project.

The third is when a certain type of high-achieving personality only wants to do something if they can excel at it. So they won’t even try to do something if they aren’t confident they can quickly be the best at it.

This is harmful because there is a whole range of human experience that takes a long time to learn how to do well. If someone isn’t willing to go through a period of sucking at it, they will never get the opportunity to excel.

There’s also a lot of things that someone might enjoy or get value out of doing adequately, or even poorly, but will end up avoiding due to their perfectionism paralysis. Then they’ll have a less rich life than they could have.

What Causes Perfectionism Paralysis

Why do we suffer from perfectionism paralysis?

There are many reasons.

It could stem from how we were raised. Many people had overbearing parents who always demanded perfection.

It could stem from mental health issues. This was the case for my wife. Before she was properly medicated for her ADHD and Bipolar Type-2, she would do things like stay up 48 hours straight while we were on vacation in order to make minor tweaks to a school project she had already finished.

It could be because we’re addicted to being high achievers. We want the praise that being the best will bring. Anything that won’t bring that praise isn’t worth doing, so we end up not doing anything at all.

It could be we’re afraid people will judge us. What if our work is bad? What if nobody likes it. Everyone will mock us, and shame us, and tell us we aren’t good enough.

Or it could be a different fear – that of losing our fantasies. As long as our work is still in progress, we can dream that when we release it, it will become a huge hit. It will change the world, billions of people will lavish us with the praise we deserve, make us rich and famous, transform our life, and grant us all of our desires.

But deep down, we know the more likely result is few people will even notice it, and all of the hard work we poured our heart and soul into will disappear into obscurity. Perfectionism paralysis is an excuse to maintain our fantasies instead of trying to achieve them.

Or it could just be that we’ve bought into motivational posters and speakers. We believe the nonsense that “if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing to the best of your ability.”

So we take that to an extreme and decide there’s no limit to how much of our abilities we should pour into something. Or twist it around and decide that if our abilities aren’t good enough to make something amazing, then it must not be worth doing.

My Experience With Perfection Paralysis

For me personally, I usually don’t have an issue with Perfection Paralysis when it comes to something I don’t care about. (Though there are exceptions.) In school, academics were easy for me, so I’d blitz through papers and tests quickly so I could finish and read a book.

I recounted a story in The Weight Loss Habit about how when I was losing the weight, I had a weekly racquetball session with my roommate. I was fat and had never played racquetball before. He was in good shape and played it regularly, so he destroyed me every time. But I didn’t mind that I always lost, since my goal was to have fun and get exercise.

But when I did care about things, perfection paralysis was a huge problem for me. Some examples:

I always go through many, many drafts of screenplays. Going through multiple drafts of screenplays is a good idea, but I have a tendency to go through far more drafts than were necessary.

And on quite a few of these scripts, I never actually tried to submit or sell them. Which means all this work was somewhat pointless.

I wrote a novel, which I also went through a ton of drafts for, and even hired a professional editor. Then I hit a roadblock when I wasn’t sure of the perfect way to handle some details about the cover art and marketing.

That was three and a half years ago, and I haven’t moved forward since.

(I’ve since learned the answers to my cover art and marketing questions while preparing The Weight Loss Habit. But one of the things I learned was that it’s a terrible idea to try to release and market two unrelated books at the same time, so I’ll be delaying my novel for several more months.)

I spent about six months researching blogging and websites, trying to learn how to make it perfect, before I actually launched Self-Helping Yourself and told anyone about it.

And even then, it was a big fight with myself to go live instead of spending more time tweaking and implementing features.

Overcoming Perfectionism Paralysis – How I Learned to Love Half-Assing It

Once I finally launched my blog, I regretted how long I had taken to do so.

I realized that many of the features I had put so much effort into were pointless. Seeing the blog live, and how people reacted to it, led me to quickly change a bunch of things.

The additional time I had spent trying to make it perfect had been as likely to lead me in the wrong direction as the right one.

Also, in those early days, I had yet to build an audience. It was just my friends reading the blog at that point, so the stakes for missteps were small.

This helped me to figure out that instead of keeping something to myself while chasing the impossible task of making it perfect, I should aim for making it “good enough,” and put it out in the world. Especially when it’s something I can fix or improve later.

So I added a few items to my Rules to Live By, as reminders and aspirations: 

• Plans for the future are just meaningless fantasy if you aren’t actively moving toward them.
• Doing something 30% is better than not doing it at all.
• Don’t spend so long researching and planning that you never get around to doing.
• Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
• It is often better to call something good enough and complete it, rather than spend an unreasonable amount of time trying to improve it and never finishing it.

(Related: While I was copy-pasting these rules, I noticed a typo that had been on the site for the last year. Instead of freaking out, I just fixed it and moved on.)

And so I’ve been making an effort to, well, make less effort. To half-ass things when they don’t deserve my whole ass.

Some examples:

There’s a semi-annual map puzzle game I play. It used to be that once I completed it, I’d spend around ten hours going through it a second time to review my answers. This wasn’t fun, but I’d catch mistakes and get a few more points. Now I don’t bother, because enjoying it matters more than my score.

I used to try to find every hidden item in video games so I could get 100% on them. Now I only play games for as long as they’re entertaining.

I used to spend an inordinate amount of time reviewing, rewriting, editing, and proofreading e-mails and Facebook posts to my friends. Then I realized the effort I put into this wasn’t benefiting anyone.

This extends to more important things.

A few days ago I created the website for The Weight Loss Habit. While I spent six months launching Self Helping Yourself, setting up the book’s website, from a parked domain to fully complete and online, took me 90 minutes.

Is the site perfect? Absolutely not.

It doesn’t look remotely like what I envisioned. I could have spent weeks wrestling with WordPress, experimenting with Themes, buying premium features, etc., to get it just the way I wanted.

Or I could have hired a designer to make it prettier than anything I could come up with. 

But that wouldn’t have been a good use of my time and money.

It’s a website. It gives information about the book. It’s good enough. Half-assing the design was the right decision.

When I tweet on the @YourselfHelping account, I’m typically writing the tweets in a minute or two. Because spending hours crafting a tweet is missing the point.

I do spend a fair amount of time reviewing and editing blog posts. But I’m not sending them off to my writing group for feedback the way I would a screenplay or book.

Getting feedback would improve the quality of my posts, but the delays and time spent rewriting would result in me only posting once a month or so. This would reduce the overall value of the blog far more than the slight increase in post quality would help.

And in this very post, there was originally a section talking about a friend of mine who avoids perfectionism paralysis. As I lay in bed the night before this post went live, I realized that section wasn’t very good, detracted from the post, and I should remove it.

But I didn’t feel the need to jump out of bed and edit the post. I was okay with the post being less than ideal for a few hours, and editing it in the the morning after it was already up. Nobody’s going to hate me and tell me I suck and never read my blog again because for a short time one of my posts had a few paragraphs that were kind of meh.

Half-Assing It Results in Better Quality Than Perfectionism

One final way to overcome perfectionism paralysis is to remind yourself that half-assing it will ultimately result in better quality than perfectionism, even if you do eventually release your “perfect” work into the world.

This seems counterintuitive until you think a little deeper about it.

People gain skill through experience. Through getting real world feedback. Through seeing what works and what doesn’t. Through repetition.

Imagine you start working on a project. You’re taking the time to “do it right.” Trying to make it perfect.

Meanwhile your competitor just quickly throws some crap together and puts it out there.

The thing she produces is poorly received because it’s mostly bad, with maybe a handful of good qualities.

So then she creates a second thing.

Now that she’s done it once, she’s better at it. She builds on the good qualities and avoids the bad ones. When she releases it, it’s much better received.

Then she releases a third thing, that’s even better. And a fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh.

By the time you’re releasing your first thing, having done it the “right” way, trying to make your thing the best you can possibly make it, your competitor is putting out her eighth thing.

She’s now way more experienced than you. She’s built up her skills and learned a lot more.

Her eighth thing is going to be much better than your first thing, regardless of your diligence.

Plus, she’ll have the platform, connections, credibility, marketing experience, and fanbase built up from having previously released seven other things.

You’ll be starting from scratch with none of that.

Think about that whenever you feel perfection paralysis creeping in.

Ask yourself, “Would I rather spend two years working on this, or spend three months, and then spend the 21 months after that creating seven other things, most of which will be much better than this thing will be if I spend two years on it.”

The obvious answer to that question should make it easier to accept half-assing it.

What are your experiences with Perfectionism Paralysis and Half-Assing It?

What about you?

Do you have problems with perfectionism paralysis?

When do you try to make things perfect and when do you half-ass them?

Have you found that half-assing things frees you up or helps you gain skills?

I’d love to know your experiences.