This is Not My Best Post
Sunday morning before my kids wake up is sacred time in our house. I make my wife a real coffee drink (Americano), make myself a mug full of pseudo-coffee dessert (brown sugar cinnamon latte with whole milk that I’ve dubbed the “brown bear”), and we sit and talk in our den. With the neighborhood cat perched on my lap and a stack of books within arm’s reach, it’s the most relaxing hour of my week.
Not today.
This Sunday morning, I can literally feel my heart beating in my chest as I fight the urge to take another peek at the countdown on my phone…I lose this round: 53:03
53:02
53:01
I have less than 53 minutes to write this post and publish it.
Why would I sacrifice the hour of tranquility that I daydream about during the week like I used to daydream about melting an adoring crowd’s collective faces off with a guitar solo?
Partially as a penance and partially as a grand experiment.
Since returning from our family vacation over spring break, I’ve written 6 posts in 8 weeks. But the story before that wasn’t pretty. Let’s look at the data:
Total blog posts written between the genesis of Destroy Your DadBod (5/21/18) and 1/14/20: 30. That’s an average of a new post every 20 days.
Total blog posts written between 1/14/20 and 4/3/23: Big, fat, stinking zero.
It would be nice if I had a meaningful excuse for this drought like falling into a coma or even a lame excuse like writer’s block. The truth is I had a list of ideas for posts that I think are just as interesting as the first 30, some even more so, but I fell into the trap of not finalizing posts because they “weren’t good enough.”
I’ve always thought that calling yourself a perfectionist was one of the best examples of a humble brag. Like the “What are my weaknesses you say? I work too hard, I care too much, I’m too focused on my customers” answer to the common interview question. But I completely missed the terrible truth that perfectionism is really a more despicable P-word in disguise. It wasn’t until taking a hard look at my 3-year gap between posts that it really sunk in: Perfectionism and procrastination are just two sides of the same coin.
So this morning I decided to give myself an hour to write, edit and publish a post.
[48:08: I’m including a few fragments of my time-stamped inner monologue so you can join me on this roller-coaster.]
Perfectionism is easy to justify in a way that strokes your ego, just listen to this:
[47:14: This part will be easy to write because this internal narrative has been running in the ole’ dome for years.]
“It’s good to have high standards and to care about quality. Look at all the mediocre stuff that gets made these days! Someone else would have been satisfied with this but I hold myself to a higher set of standards and so I’m not going to settle.”
After patting yourself on the back, it’s also easy to look down your nose at those lowly, disorganized procrastinators. With their feeble attention spans and inability to focus, how the hell do they even get dressed in the morning!?! But it turns out that perfectionism is one of your DadBod’s sneakiest maneuvers. When you think you’ve conquered outright procrastination, your DadBod will trick you into settling into the inertia it craves by offering the Trojan horse of “high standards” that is chock-a-block full of noodling and meaningless tinkering at the margins.
Perfectionism also sets you up for major disappointment. If I spend 60 minutes on a blogpost and it gets only a handful of views, that should be expected. But if I literally spend months on one and it lands with a collective “meh”, that can trigger a tsunami of negative self-talk that threatens all my future writing.
[31:10: If this post gets more views than ones I obsessed over for weeks, I think I will feel simultaneous pride and nausea.]
Another tempting delusion that reinforces the endless cycle of revision is the notion that setting a deadline or a quota will rob your work of its creative essence, of the spark that makes it uniquely interesting or insightful. Surprisingly, a common thread among advice from prolific authors and artists is that constraints don’t hamper creativity, they actually help it. When left totally unconstrained, it’s easy to wander off the path and end up lost in the mist without ever reaching your destination.
[16:46: I need a snappy ending, I HATE it when a post falls flat plus the last part of what you write is always the part that sticks out in people’s minds.]
Make sure you aren’t falling for the same trap that I was and hiding your procrastination behind the veil of “high standards.” If you truly want to improve at something, you have to get reps and you have to get feedback. This means sometimes putting half-baked or only lightly polished work out into the world. Even though it can be painful and can feel like settling, it’s a price worth paying.
[11:00: OK, time to edit.]
[5:07: Shit! I need at least one picture because nothing turns people off more than a giant block of text.]
[2:09: Copying and pasting into Squarespace, here goes nothing!]