The Minority Report

All I can say is…wow. Slava Akhmechet hit it right on the head with this post. I too struggle with “perfectionism” and over thinking things constantly. I get really excited about a project or an idea, write it down in my notebook and then nothing ever seems to happen. Or I start and then as Def says, “doubt inevitably creeps in”.

defmacro – Taming Perfectionism

I could always do this to some degree, but this time the sense of beauty (or its lack) felt far stronger and more refined than ever before. It was so strong that I found myself unable to complete any serious tasks. Whenever I sat down to implement my vision (whether by coding, or writing, or designing), I’d find that what I produce inevitably falls short. The code was too crude, the writing too clumsy, and the design too ugly. No matter what I did, there would be something essential missing from my implementation, and I could never put my mind on what it was. Producing anything took forever, and ultimately I discarded it all because it just wasn’t good enough.

What is worse is that not only was my work not good enough, it was also not important enough. After I’d work on something for a while, a doubt would inevitably creep in and convince me that what I’m doing is irrelevant on any reasonable scale. My work was always a flawed, irrelevant vision with a crude implementation. Why bother doing anything at all, then?

Perfectionism, which was always a friend, turned into my worst enemy.

I think I’m going to have to put on my bathroom mirror, “Real artists ship”.

This is why I’m starting to turn my attention to Agile development and shifting my thoughts to more of an interpreted language (scripting language) kinda task management style. Iterate, view results, iterate…

For example, ordinarily this blog would drive me crazy because the template is not perfect. The plugins are not quite right and like I stated in the first post, I wanted to give a huge shout out to Gina Trapiani and others that I read on a daily basis. I basically sucked it up and plunged right in trying desperately to silence that perfectionist voice in my head.

Real artists ship.Real artists ship.