My Struggle with Perfectionism? It’s Universal
What I’m learning from my students as they struggle to put their new creations into the world can help you, too.
I want to talk about perfectionism.
A few weeks ago, I launched Podcast Allies’ first course for new podcasters. It’s called “Podcast Liftoff: From Creation to Promotion, Get Your Podcast Off the Ground.” It’s both digital and a series of live Zoom calls. Those Zoom calls are giving me a fantastic opportunity to get to know students and to learn not just what they’re striving for, but what they’re up against.
Many of their stumbling blocks are particular to their own situations — equipment issues, titling, audience questions, bandwidth, and on and on. But on yesterday’s excellent call, I got a sense of one that is both buried and nearly universal in this group that happens to be largely women: perfectionism.
Pre-pandemic: Helping Podcast Allies’ client Environmental Defense Fund develop a new podcast.
If you happen to have a teeny tiny problem with perfectionism, like (ahem) me, it’s easy to slip into never launching that podcast, pitching a story, starting that business, writing that novel — whatever your creative passion is that’s still in your desk drawer. In one form or another, my students want to have everything figured out, every ingredient in place, before they set a date to launch. I’m like that, to a degree. I get it.
What new podcasters should be striving for before launch date is clarity, not perfection. With clarity of message, purpose, format, frequency, and approach, comes freedom — freedom to experiment, to be authentically human, to make mistakes. The freedom to make something far more fulfilling, rewarding, creative and insightful than you could have done with perfectionism as your north star.
Moreover, at Podcast Allies, we come from a public radio storytelling background — and if there was ever a breeding ground for perfectionism, this is it. So we do train students to get their editorial plans in place and produce a few episodes before release date. (There are practical, not just emotional reasons for batching production ahead of time.)
But as we all know, great is the enemy of good. And the truth is that every podcast — like almost every creative endeavor — will evolve over time. No matter how hard you try to make your first effort perfect, where you start will not be at the height of your potential, at least if you’re persistent. The unattractive alternative is to quit before you grow.
What new podcasters should be striving for before launch date is clarity, not perfection. With clarity of message, purpose, format, frequency, and approach, comes freedom — freedom to experiment, to be authentically human, to make mistakes, and ultimately to make something far more fulfilling, rewarding, creative and insightful than you could have done with perfectionism as your north star.
I’m writing this as much for myself as for my students. I’m writing it for all the brave and sensitive creative people out there dreaming of their next thing. I hope it helps someone today.
How do you wrestle with perfectionism? How do you balance it against getting a new creation out into the world as the gift that it is, even with its bumpiness and imperfections?
Originally posted on Medium Feb 24, 2021 by Elaine Appleton Grant
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