<story><title>Being a perfectionist is an obstacle and how to beat it</title><url>https://mediatag.io/blog/why-being-a-perfectionist-is-an-obstacle-and-how-to-beat-it</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maldusiecle</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m really skeptical of this attitude. In a lot of fields I&amp;#x27;ve seen people who commit themselves to &amp;quot;just getting it done.&amp;quot; The result is that they do get a lot of work done: and it&amp;#x27;s bad, it&amp;#x27;s mediocre, it doesn&amp;#x27;t have value. On the other hand, one can easily think of creators who spent a long time on one work (maybe &amp;quot;too much&amp;quot; time), and the result was work of lasting value.&lt;p&gt;Of course, this relates more to artistic work than technical matters. But I think it is damaging to act as if all work is equivalent to deadlined development work. Great things come from people being impractical.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ryanwaggoner</author><text>I think you’re missing a few things:&lt;p&gt;1. Many great artists were extremely prolific and created lots of mediocre work, we just forget about those. There seem to be very few perfectionists who just created a few great works, not “releasing” them until they were perfect. There are some, but they’re the exception.&lt;p&gt;2. You’re also not seeing all the many perfectionists who waited until things were perfect and then never finished at all, which is by far the biggest risk. I’d argue there are orders of magnitude more of these than perfectionists who ship perfect things.&lt;p&gt;I suspect that many of the “just get it done” people who do lots of bad or mediocre work &lt;i&gt;will&lt;/i&gt; end up creating great things, you’re just catching them earlier in their learning &amp;#x2F; experimentation cycle. But those people will learn and adapt so much faster than the perfectionists will.</text></comment>
<story><title>Being a perfectionist is an obstacle and how to beat it</title><url>https://mediatag.io/blog/why-being-a-perfectionist-is-an-obstacle-and-how-to-beat-it</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>maldusiecle</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m really skeptical of this attitude. In a lot of fields I&amp;#x27;ve seen people who commit themselves to &amp;quot;just getting it done.&amp;quot; The result is that they do get a lot of work done: and it&amp;#x27;s bad, it&amp;#x27;s mediocre, it doesn&amp;#x27;t have value. On the other hand, one can easily think of creators who spent a long time on one work (maybe &amp;quot;too much&amp;quot; time), and the result was work of lasting value.&lt;p&gt;Of course, this relates more to artistic work than technical matters. But I think it is damaging to act as if all work is equivalent to deadlined development work. Great things come from people being impractical.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>frading</author><text>&amp;gt; Great things come from people being impractical&lt;p&gt;Yes, but in my experience this is more an exception, compared to the vast majority of people who never ship anything, because &amp;quot;it&amp;#x27;s not quite right yet&amp;quot;. That&amp;#x27;s where the danger lies.&lt;p&gt;And I think there are plenty of similarities between art and tech, regarding this.&lt;p&gt;For a web app, it will have to be shared before growing in quality and becoming great. Github, Basecamp, Twitter all did that. It&amp;#x27;s always about having a first released being a kick ass half or a half ass product (Getting Real was phrasing it like that if I recall correctly).&lt;p&gt;Same for a film. It might be released on a specific date to a wide audience, but it has gone through many iterations, discussed between dozens of people.&lt;p&gt;And just getting it done does not mean that you have to stop everything once your deadline has passed. If there is more work that you want to add to improve it, do it. But at least you&amp;#x27;ve shared it as an intermediary stage, and you and your work have probably both grown from that. And you can now give yourself another deadline.</text></comment>