I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
Life is not a one-way, single-lane road. It’s a sprawling, free-for-all field. If your goal is to get from point A to point B, the straight and obvious way does not have to be your path, and it may not be the best choice. The assumption of the perfectionist is that there is a golden path and that no other way will suffice.
Stephen Guise, How to be an Imperfectionist
Nonfiction books thrive on the idea that there is one right way to do something. But often what a how-to guide offers is just what worked for one person. I found that with acrylic painting books. They tell me what one painter does to succeed. In order to find my way as a painter, I had to experiment and figure out for myself what worked.
Now I’m finding it with books about writing a book. I read them and think, “Oh no, I have to do that?” when such a book might suggest something I’m not really up for doing. But I probably don’t have to do whatever they suggested. I could, if I wanted, or there’s probably another way to achieve the same thing, if I really need to.
Guise writes further:
[All paths] have some value, and while some are measurably better than others, finding the best one isn’t as important as moving forward in life. Unequivocally, the worst choice is inaction. Perfectionists often choose inaction because, with an infinite number of possible paths, finding the perfect one is difficult to figure out. When pursuing some end, you can know where you want to go, but give yourself flexibility in your path to get there. If you keep your path flexible and practice perseverance, you’re going to get many of the things you want in life.
Setting up a 1000-day project is a way for me to practice perseverance, although I didn’t commit ahead of time to just one goal. My goal right now is to build an income based on self-publishing and marketing books. But I’m staying flexible as to how I make that work.
I really love Guise’s book on imperfectionism and I come back to it again and again when I’m feeling perfectionistic (which is often). Reading endless how-to books to try to find the right way to do something is a form of perfection.
Here’s his list of how to think about action in an imperfectionistic way:
- Don’t care about results. Care about putting in the work.
- Don’t care about problems. Care about making progress despite them. Or if you must fix something, focus on the solution.
- Don’t care what other people think. Care about who you want to be and what you want to do.
- Care less about doing it right. Care more about doing it at all.
- Don’t care about failure. Care about success.
- Don’t care about timing. Care about the task.
I’m pretty sure that what I need to do to write and market a book is to just write and market a book. I don’t have to read how other people did it. I don’t have to do it perfectly or in record time. I don’t have to do it right. I just have to do it.
I did this with painting. I suppose I could have gone and gotten a fine arts’ education or degree to give myself a foundation so I could do it right. Instead, I just painted a lot. I finished paintings. I submitted them to shows. I sold one. I got an award for another. It’s not much–but I did it. I created paintings worth hanging on a wall.
I can do this with book writing too.