You know what the truth is about perfectionism?
Perfectionism is spelled F-E-A-R. The only reason something has to be good enough is because you are afraid of what will happen if it’s not. And what is our phisiological response to fear?
Fight or Flight.
I, unfortunatley, am not much of a fighter. I tend to cower. And run.
Sit on that for a sec while I take a roundabout way to communicate what I’m learning and want to share:
I’ve been songwriting weekly with a friend. She knows music, and I know words. Together we’ve thrown together fun songs we feel really good about and even love, and it’s been nice to celebrate some bite-size writing victories. We plowed through writing a new song, sometimes two, every time we got together and stacked up a nice list of 5 or 6 songs.
Then we learned a few things. Received some feedback. Started taking another look.
We never said, "Gross! This is awful! What were we thinking??" With fresh eyes and new ideas a miraculous thing happened. We just made the songs better. The same songs. Better. Came up with a new line or a chord progression that just pushed the song up one more notch. Lifted it one level higher.
And I just can’t explain that feeling I get when we make something we thought was already finished better. It’s MAGIC. One tweak inspired by that second look over can make the entire work just bloom over into something completley new and amazing.
We had a great moment like that today, and I told my friend, I wish I could be this patient with writing my book. I wish I could understand that every page and every scene will naturally grow better with time. That the first word is never the final word. That I can be patient with the time it takes to make the scene bloom into what I really want it to be.
Battling fears with appreciating and enjoying the process.
Do you look at a seed and say, "man, that is one crappy petunia."? No! You know it's in the infant stage of what it will build and grow into and you let it be, give it time, nurture it appropriately. You don't hate it for being a seed. You don't stress that because its a seed it might never have the potential to be a perfect petunia.
Obviously, I'm mostly lecturing myself here. But maybe someone else needed to hear that its okay have a handful of seeds. What's not okay is being too afraid to ever plant them.
[CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3APetunia_7151.JPG
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