4 Reasons Why You Should Give Yourself Permission to Suck

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It's the dark side of perfectionism. You want your creative project to be perfect right away. You have little patience for the process of creating first drafts, second drafts, third drafts. And heaven forbid you share your work with anybody else until it's just right. Share an unfinished draft?! The horror!

Sound familiar? Then you just might be a perfectionist.

It's both a blessing and a curse. Perfectionists strive for kaizen—continuous improvement. They are never bored. They often excel in the workplace.

But being that way can sabotage your creative work. There's no need to let perfect be the enemy of good. Putting that kind of pressure on ourselves just leads us to misery and self-doubt.

Give yourself permission to suck! Here's why:

1. Instant perfection is like a unicorn. It does not exist. Nobody gets it right the first time. All published authors have editors. Actors do second, third, and twentieth takes of their scenes. Chefs tweak herbs and spices and sauces before they put the dish on the menu.
   
   Okay, maybe there's ONE exception. We've all seen those brilliant improv comedians who stand up on stage, and somebody gives them a prompt, and they produce comic genius on the spot. But dude, those people have supernatural powers as far as I'm concerned. They're not the standard by which we mere mortals should be judged.
   
   And even those guys screw up. Take it from comic genius Wayne Brady, who told the Denver Post that Whose Line Is It Anyway? would do about three hours of taping to get a 30-minute show.
   
2. Feedback is valuable. The benefits of having other people read your drafts can far outweigh the terror and vulnerability you may feel in sharing those drafts. Why? Because you can never truly be inside somebody else's head. The more perspective you have on how your creative work is perceived by others, the better able you are to tweak that work to meet your goals. After all, the ultimate goal is for people to see your work, right? Not for you to keep it in a box.
   
3. People who don't nit-pick get MORE DONE. Take that, Type A personalities. In the time you spent editing your blog post for the fifth time, somebody else wrote two more blog posts. Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and publish because it's good enough. Fight against "analysis paralysis" and you'll end up with more work to show for it.
   
4. Witnessing someone else's screw-ups and idiosyncrasies can be kind of awesome. Isn't that why we like live performances? We don't go to a concert expecting a regurgitation of the studio album. And I love watching interviews with performers that I've known only through scripted TV or radio. Because they loosen up and show their true colors, and drop F-bombs, and make inappropriate comments, and basically reveal that they're human beings like the rest of us. It's refreshing.

Believe me, I know it's tough. I edited this blog post more times than I care to share. This post may be a final draft, but I'm not! I'm a work in progress, man.

But mistakes and flaws and messiness and imperfection are what make us human. Lovable, even. In blog terms: relatable. And those things can be just as good as perfection.