Letting go of perfection

I’ve been thinking about how to write this article for a while. This is the second article since two years ago when I decided that I would make a habit of writing weekly. Unlike other habits: training, eating well or drinking less, this one would have a lasting digital impression and I wanted to give each weekly article it’s allocated time. So far, I have given this article a total allocation of 101 weeks (approximately).

I work as a Product Designer and the next time I’m sat in an interview, where the mood is stiff and even for ‘agile’ companies the interview questions are tediously scripted. I will answer with the title above to the inevitable “What is your weakness?” question because one of my weaknesses is certainly letting go of ‘perfection’.

So why can’t I let go of perfection? Firstly, I’m not a perfectionist and by many peoples standards, my definition of perfection is an embarrassing excuse for output. For the purpose of this article, you can think of perfection actually as work output (although for the purpose of future interviews, I will maintain the position that I am constantly delivering design perfection, albeit delayed).

To be clear I don’t believe I’m suffering from procrastination, which unlike letting go is prioritising other things ahead of something you should do — although I had my own battles with that in my teens and early twenties.

Here is how my mind works in the context of writing an article. It may be a familiar journey to you. The general thought process looks like this:

1. How many words is considered an adequate article length
2. What illustrations do I need to be preparing for each article and what should the image-ratio be?
3. Is the New York Times currently looking for writers in Sweden? (This lofty goal is all the more impressive considering my ‘B’ grade in GCSE english literature)
4. Who will read this article and what are their judgements likely to be?

I’ve often been the mix of ‘overly-ambitious meets somewhat insecure type’ of person and a solution that has always saved me is planning. It sounds stupendously boring to describe ‘planning’ as a saving grace — it hardly steals ones imagination but it is the solution in the case of this exercise.

How should I write one plan an article? I learnt an exercise for sketching years ago on a field-trip in Rome. Everybody was given an allotted 10 minutes to sketch a roman statue in one of the churches. After 10 minutes we were stopped by our lecturers and tasked with a second exercise: 1 minute to draw the same statue. After a minute had expired we repeated the exercise for a final time but this time we were given just 10 seconds.

Later in the day, when we had made it back to our hotel, we started to compare sketches with one-another. It wasn’t that the drawings that were better than one-another but there was something interesting in the process we had just discovered and it has been one of my biggest lessons from a very brief university education — that structuring a creative process begets a more creative product, it’s done in film .

My process for writing will be based on a structure similar to that of sketching. This article was written with the objective to get something out. So this article isn’t for you, it’s for me.