Perfect is the Enemy

Last Updated on April 20, 2024 by Candice Landau

Aiming for perfection and then not achieving it is bound to make you feel more like a failure than chipping away at something imperfectly but making slow progress. If you struggle to go vegan, go vegetarian. If you struggle to go vegetarian, cut down on your meat consumption. You don’t need to do everything perfectly to make a difference and to start making changes.

This is true for getting work done too. Write a shitty first draft. Hand in C+ work and deliver rather than be too slow because it had to be perfect. Learn to dive, even if you’re a mess at the start. You can get better over time. Start doing the thing you’re not brilliant at. You’ll get better with practice.

When I started at Scuba Diving magazine, I agonized over writing the Letter from the Editor. It took me ages and to be frank, it felt like pulling teeth.

Time after time, I’d turn to the Managing Editor and ask what he thought, and time and again, he’d give me the same advice, “What can you share that gives readers a behind-the-scenes view of what we’re doing?” Though it took a while for that sink in, today, I can usually have a “shitty” first draft done in half an hour. Best of all, it’s starting to feel easier to write a slightly-less-shitty first draft now. If I waited for perfect, I’d have never gotten to this point.

If I waited for perfect, my own underwater pictures wouldn’t be used in my latest magazine article. If I had waited for perfect, I’d never have posted a reel that I felt wasn’t great, but that ended up getting 500,000 views. I’d never have learned to sail and I’d never have written and published a book of poetry. Frankly, I still don’t think I’m brilliant at any of these things but, I do them and that’s more than a lot of people can say. On that note…

You can always improve later, just make sure you “ship,” make sure you “start,” make sure you “deliver.” It doesn’t need to be perfect. This is as much advice for myself as it is to all of you out there worrying about being perfect or “doing it right.”

In the words of the most powerful slogan in the world, “just do it.”