Experiment 1: How I cured myself of perfectionism.

Many artists and creators struggle with perfectionism and until recently I was cursed with the desire to get everything just right. Cursed because, taken too far perfectionism means- you never finish anything, you never release! I decided the time had come to get over myself. (2 minute read.)

I had two major objectives for myself:

1. to get comfortable sharing things that I knew weren't finished or perfect.
2. to dramatically reduce the time between initial creation and first performance/showing.

My motive for 1) I've already mentioned. My motive for 2) was to encourage myself into a state of flow. The faster I get feedback on what I'm doing the faster I know what's working and which direction to go next.

I decided to do an experiment. Here are the design parameters.

1. I would focus on my songs. Why? Because my songs are the things that I am most scared about sharing. I care about them, they are precious to me and they speak fundamentally to the most personal parts of my life. If I could share my songs without them having to be perfect I would definitely be able to share other things.
2. I would record one take of me playing guitar and singing straight to camera. If I made a mistake, fumbled a word or a chord, tough luck. It was going up as it was.
3. I would aim for an edit/encode/upload time of less than one hour.
4. I would share the recording the same day on social media.

I chose to share them first on Facecrack because I already had a large number of followers, I could get rapid feedback in the direct form of "likes" and - well again- Facecrack kind of terrifies me :-)

So over the course of about a month I shared 11 songs, which I shall now share with you here! I'll finish up by sharing what I learned.

Do you struggle with perfectionism? How does it effect you? Have you successfully managed to overcome it? Let me know in the comments!

Yours

@kindle Copyright and Disclaimer.