Day 6: Pursuit of perfection
Normally, I’ll write these posts the night before they’re published as a nice way to reflect upon the day. Yesterday that didn’t happen. I’m writing this the morning of Day 7, struggling to come up with something insightful to say. I even considered not writing one of these altogether. Still, I write this as an exercise in letting go of my perfectionist attitude towards everything.
I’m the kind of person who takes 5 minutes to write a single sentence of an essay. Each word will be meticulously edited, and edited, and edited until I’m satisfied enough to move on. I’ve memorized every keyboard shortcut to delete a word or sentence to speed up these edits. That perfectionist mindset, though, can make it so that what I write might never see the light of day. This applies to my writing, my programming projects, and my willingness to try new things.
I’ve written about this attitude before. Anything that anyone has created is just another draft. Ask any artist to critique their own work and they’ll give you a million ways they could have made it better. It takes an active effort to shut up your inner critic and release what you’ve made anyways. In fact, that can imbue the work with a sense of authenticity and personality. The choice of where and where not to make a change are yet another part of an artist’s style.
What I worked on
The exercise on writing down “Bad Ideas and Problems” has been particularly great to get me thinking about what gaps exist in the world. Idea generation and problem identification are like a muscle. By writing down anything I notice, I’m putting in the reps of that muscle and it’s becoming slightly easier to see the world through the entrepreneurial lens. In the process, I’ve even found some general problem spaces that I wasn’t previously considering.
The biggest question mark that remains is the concept of go to market. How do you get your product in front of potential customers? Even if you’ve managed to solve their more pressing issues, how will your product find these people? I’ll be doing some reading on that question in the coming days.