Know When To Finish
On the dangers of perfectionism.
In the shadows geniuses die, without ever knowing of their magic, granted, without knowing it, long before they were born.
En Algún Lugar, by Duncan Dhu (translated from Spanish)
“Just start”. That’s the most common advice given to any man trying to begin something. Whether he wants to start a business, write a book, paint a masterpiece, become a famous musician, or simply do something new in his life, that’s the advice he’ll receive from most who have experience and can thus show him the way. I remember a few years ago, when I was trying to start my online business, that was the main thing other, more experienced businessmen told me. And it’s pretty good advice. But it’s… incomplete.
Being able to pull the trigger and just start moving forward is a great skill to have, and it’s one that most don’t possess. It’s almost enough to make you completely different from the masses of mediocre men. Almost. The reason why it’s not enough it’s because, well, starting doesn’t actually mean anything. Anyone can start. And many do.
The true difference, the one thing that actually makes you stand out, is knowing when to finish.
Not “Quit”, Finish
I don’t mean you should know when and how to quit trying and give up. That’s not what I mean by “finishing”. Knowing when to finish means mastering “good enough”, and not letting perfectionism kill your momentum.
Ironically, if you don’t know how to finish, you will end up quitting eventually.
I’ve seen it time and time again: a guy wants to start a creative project, a business, transform his body, etc. He starts off with great motivation and discipline. Let’s say for the sake of example that he is trying to start and grow an Instagram account —and this is based on a true story, although I’ll change the specifics.
He starts with an idea in mind: he wants to create content about martial arts. He’s passionate about it, and wants to make it into a side hustle of sorts. He’s very knowledgable about that topic and he has a lot of things to share.
He decides to start, after listening to my advice. I tell him to just start and figure out the specifics later. Good advice, but again, incomplete.
So he starts, and sets out to create a logo. He spends 2 weeks working on it, until he has something that satisfies him. After that, he sits down to create his business plan. He researches, watches videos, writes everything down, devises a plan for the next 3 years of his content creation business. This takes him a month, because he wants to “make sure the strategy is solid”. After he has his business plan, he decides to join an online business community to learn how to put his plan into practice. He spends 2 months adjusting his plan, learning how to create videos, twitching the logo and branding and networking with other aspiring creators.
Finally, he is ready. He decides to create his first video. Because his mind is overloaded with information, he tweaks and modifies the video for a whole week. He sends it to 5 friends to get feedback, and they all say something different. So he adjusts it. He tweaks it again but isn’t satisfied. The music doesn’t fit well enough. The video footage could have higher definition. The AI voice he chose isn’t what he wants. So he decides to start over. He spends another week creating it. He gets feedback from the community. Tweaks it again. He is then forced to take a few days off because his 9 to 5 got too demanding.
He’s back at it again, and takes another week to finalize the video. Finally, after months of work, he’s finally on his way.
He hits publish and the video goes out to his 20 followers. 5 likes, 0 comments and shares. Basically zero return for the amount of time and energy he has spent creating it. In his mind, it’s a nonsense tradeoff. Months of work for this result?
Naturally, he gets discouraged. He concludes it’s just too much work. And with his approach, he’s absolutely right.
While he spent months to even get his first post published, some random guy created a shit logo in 5 minutes, used a random post template for his posts, and committed to posting daily for 4 months. His content was terrible at first, but he learnt quickly by gauging the response of the audience he started to build. He didn’t get caught up in wanting all posts to be perfect, he understood the most important thing was to put his stuff out there, even if it felt mediocre at first, to avoid becoming a failed perfectionist.
The production quality of your project needs to be correlated to your audience size. There’s no point in spending all that time, money and energy just so no one sees what you created. Start with something that’s “good enough” and improve as you go. So many well intentioned projects die before they even get off the ground because their authors fall for the trap of perfectionism. They never know when to finish editing and just hit “publish”. Genius works of many kinds never see the light of day because their authors get consumed by perfectionism and fear publishing something that is not good enough.
You have to learn to be satisfied with imperfection. This does not mean you should settle for mediocrity, but it does mean you have to learn to recognize when you’re just procrastinating launching your project out of fear, and you have to be able to just pull the trigger when it’s 90% optimized, instead of waiting for it to be 100% ready —which it’ll never be.
As a writer, I have had to learn this myself. I frequently ask myself what’s better: a single near-perfect book, published by my children after I’m dead, because I spent my entire life editing something that was good enough 50 years ago? Or 50 books that increase in quality progressively, as I learn by doing, publishing, getting raw feedback from the people that read my works?
After a certain point, the right choice is to just publish the damn thing. The true challenge isn’t starting, it’s finishing the job. It’s leaning back and saying “this is good enough”, and having the balls to post it, publish it, send it, or whatever action signals the completion of your project.
Start fast, yes, but most importantly, finish fast, and iterate and improve fast. Otherwise you’ll be one of those men who had great ideas, had the guts to start working on them, but left them all unfinished, unpublished, incomplete. You’ll be the proud author of 30 half-books, the proud creator of 20 logos for businesses, the proud musical mind behind 200 different song beats with no lyrics. You’ll be on your deathbed looking back at the talent you had, realizing all of those were good enough, and the only reason you didn’t share them with the world was fear, masking as perfectionism.
Thank you for reading!
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God bless you,
Simple Man
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Perfectionism is that ever constant whisper in the back of every creator’s mind, constantly judging the finished product. I’ve been a civil contractor for my entire adult life and can still identify every flaw in my work while hearing nothing but praise from the customer. It’s a curse or a blessing depending on your point of view but it’s always there. Enough is enough, indeed. Great article.
Excellent post. I read it twice. All I would add is perfectionism is always based in shame, not the urge to make something perfect. As you summed up at the end, your perfectionism is rationalizing fear. It is overcoming the fear we must work on.
Incidentally I am writing here on Substack precisely to improve this great failing of mine. I am forcing myself to publish regularly. It helps.
Thank you for writing. That was a great read.