Choose Action Over Perfection

Our world isn’t perfect. Our work won’t be perfect.

There is a difference between striving for excellence and striving for perfection. The first is attainable, gratifying, and healthy. The second is unattainable, frustrating, and neurotic. It is also a terrible waste of time.

– Edwin Bliss

Imperfect progress realized is better than perfection imagined.

A perfectly imagined work of art is useless until it exists outside of your head. And outside of your head it won’t be perfect. That’s the price we pay for bringing things into reality.

A perfectly outlined novel is unreadable until it moves out of the outline and into words, dialogue, conflicts, characters. And in that form, in those many words on a page, it won’t be perfect. Some of the words will be wrong.

We must sacrifice our ideas of perfection to get the work into reality. The price of action is the pain of imperfection, our own imperfection.

Our world isn’t perfect. Our work won’t be perfect.

The solution? (You might not like it.)