Focused - 162: Perfectionism

Episode Date: October 11, 2022

David & Mike discuss perfectionism, procrastination, and overcoming the urge to get everything just right.

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks and joined by my co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hi, Mike. Hey, David. How's it going? Excellent. This is the very first version of Focus to be recorded in Indoor Studios, my new space. So I'm kind of excited to be talking to you today here. Awesome. No longer am I in a corner of my daughter's vacated room. So it's nice.

It's nice being here. Yeah, it looks great. You've sent over some pictures. Looks like you've done some cool things with the space, which I think we're going to talk about today. Yeah, we'll get into it a little bit, the focus angle of it. I mean, there's still more work to do, but it's coming along. It's good enough to use.

That's a good sign. Indeed. But before we get into all that, I just wanted to take a minute to thank everybody who contributed to St. Jude. We just wrapped up the St. Jude. I say we, like I did all the work. All I did was talk to a few folks and donate some money. But they made over $700,000 for St. Jude in the month of September at Relay. And I've heard from a lot of listeners who made contributions and got their employers to match and all the cool stuff that everybody did.

It's just really makes you feel good to be part of stuff like that. Yes, it does. This is one of my favorite things that Relay does every single year. And huge shout out to Mike and steven for putting this together i know they have a bunch of help and we all mentioned it on our shows but uh it's really mind-boggling the amount of organization and preparation that something like this requires and it's kind of crazy to see it all be pulled off, including the live podcast-a-thon that was able to happen this year. So it's just really cool. And I'm really honored to be a part of something. When we wrap up the campaign and the number was over $706,000, it was the most that

we've ever raised. That's a huge testament to the amount of work that Mike and Steven and all the folks at St. Jude have done. And I am honored to be a part of it. I would love to be a fly on the wall in that St. Jude meeting where they're like, wait a second, that group of nerdy podcasters raised $700,000. How did that happen? Yeah. Well, the fact is, you know know what the people that are listening to our shows are very kind

and we we just have great listeners and relay and it shows every year yeah so thank you to all of you who have contributed means a lot to us

yeah so like I said earlier I am talking from Indoor Studios which is my nerdy name for my new space in fact I want to talk about that for a

minute. The, the act of naming my space, I asked my labs members and some people sent names in and eventually I landed on indoor studios. And the original thought was, you know, I like the fact that there are like famous spaces where, where great things have happened with interesting names you know i was thinking about you know um you know what's that one in in london where the beatles recorded um guys it's killing me now um abby road yeah so there's abby road studios there's you know there are there are locations around the world that become more than just a space that people work in. And I felt like kind of personalizing it in this way. In fact, we have art for it.

A friend made some really cool poster art for it. But just like kind of going to that next level. To me, I wanted that because I felt like I want to connect to the space as more than just a room that I put on the house. Yeah. I mean, it makes a ton of sense and I love all the things that you have done, the intentional choices that you've made. But that is something I remember from when we talked to Annie Murphy Paul, author of The Extended Mind, just the importance of your environment and the impact that it has on your ability to focus and do your best, in your case, creative work. But really,

anyone can benefit regardless of what you do for what you call work. Having a place where you can cut out all the distractions and just focus on the thing that's important, that's critical. And I would encourage everyone to think about whether you've got a separate space on your house or not now how can you manipulate your environment to facilitate that it's really one of the the most important things you can do i think because the whole culture and the whole atmosphere around us is all about distraction and grabbing your attention so you've got to figure out ways to fight back against that. Yeah. And we're going to go into it much deeper on the Mac Power Users episode that drops just a few days before this episode. So some of you may have heard this before, but I really

did intentionally look at the space in terms of stations. And like, there's a place where I can do live video. There's a place where I can sit at a desk and do computer work. There's an analog desk, you know, everything. I even have a comfy chair area where I can sit and work on the iPad and do OmniFocus reviews and things like that. And, you know, I haven't got it all wired together just yet, but, you know, having dedicated space for each thing is really important. Okay. So now you've got me curious. You mentioned an analog desk and a chair,

and that's actually something that I just added to my office. I took out, I had a couch that has been in my office since we moved into this house because it had this little corner nook and it was the only place that this really fit. And so when we finished off the office, we put the couch in there, but I didn't really like the couch and it took up a bunch of room. So that has been replaced and I have, it's like a knockoff stressless chair. Stressless is a brand of, I guess it's got Nordic roots for this sort of recliner with a footstool sort of a thing. And I got a knockoff, one of those from Costco for my birthday from my wife and my parents.

I went in on it together. And I love that thing sitting in the corner. It's my reading chair, basically. And I've got the analog desk with all the bottles of ink and stuff like that. I've shown you pictures of that. But I'm really curious what you've done with yours. Well, mine is a family heirloom. It's an antique drop-leaf desk. My mom's side is from Quebec slash Massachusetts. And this thing is over 100 years old easily, probably 150 years old. It's a drop-leaf desk, and it's just gorgeous. And I've always admired it,

even as a kid growing up. And it always made me sad because we had it in a part of the house growing up where it never got used. It was a showpiece more than a usable piece. And when, you know, my mom passed, I told my sister, this is something I would really like. And I use it all the time as an analog desk. I mean, I write at this desk and there's nothing digital there. I do have some charging built into it so I can charge things there. But largely, this is where I sit in and do writing. And it's also where I pay the bills and just like it's just kind of that kind of space. But I love it. It doesn't fit my aesthetic in the sense that it's super antique looking,

but it's a real antique, and it's got a fancy crown at the top. As a woodworker, I'll tell you, this is not exactly my style, but it's so well made. Every drawer is dovetailed. It's got really cool sliding arms that come out when you drop the leaf. Whoever made this knew what he was doing or she and uh it just i really like it so i've always been i've been using it for several years now and it's got a special place here in indoor studio and it's got a bb8 on top of it it looks like

right now i the picture i sent you we're not going to share because i'm in the midst of cleaning and it's it's got books on it and all sorts of stuff right now, but I usually keep it pretty clean. And that is, it's a separate desk. I use the single chair though. You convinced me to buy this cool chair. It goes up and down, you know, so I put it down when I sit at that desk. Cool. So the chair, you slide back and forth between the two desks. Yeah. Okay. And then what is the other chair that you have? If you don't mind sharing some details with that. There's a company called Article that, I forget how they came into my orbit,

but they sell direct to consumer and the manufacturing is done in Vietnam. And they just do make really nice stuff. And it's a solid walnut like comfy chair and i ordered this one at the beginning of covid and it showed up like six months ago it's like it took like two years to get this chair wow but uh it is uh it's really nice and i like it and uh here's a picture we can put in the show notes, but it's just a comfy leather chair and the dog sits in it more probably than I do. But at the end of the day, I put it

under a window. I do like to kind of sit and like do stuff away from my big screen. It's a great, it's a great iPad chair, great book reading chair. We're going to talk about that by the way today. And in deep focus, I've been doing an experiment with analog books versus digital books. So it's just a nice little place to sit there. I keep my little electronic saxophone next to it. I'll sit there and take a break and play some stuff there, too. So I've got all these different workstations in the space, and there's a couple of them.

I can tell you that one thing I'm struggling with a little bit is I have moved my meditation cushion into the studio because it's always a little frustrating to want to meditate. And, you know, like I normally kept in the bedroom, but if Daisy wants to, you know, do laundry or just hang out and watch hallmark channel or something and i'm sitting there meditating it's it's uncomfortable for her and for me right you know um so i put that in here but it's not work you know it's like do i do i put that stuff into my workspace or not but i think the convenience of being able to shut the door and do whatever i want is probably going to mean it stays here. Nice. So what else do you want to share about this from a focus perspective?

Just, you know, I am fortunate to be building the space, so I'm trying to bring focus and intentionality to every phase of it. You know, it's like emptying your room out and starting from scratch. So the whole thing is about focus and context. And I really like that. One thing I did is I put a TV up on the wall.

And just in the two or three days I've been really working here, it has an Apple TV attached to it. And AirPlay sharing my iPad screen with, you know know kind of my status board on it you know i've i've talked about this a lot max sparky but i love the idea of a status board to be able to look up and see what's going on and airplay sharing from an always on ipad to this thing is really turning out to be useful to be able to sit there and look up and say oh when's my next appointment or what are my tasks for today what What timer am I running now? What's the weather?

What time is it where Mike Schmitz lives? You know, all that stuff is just available to me. And that does help with context shifting. And the same thing with like having your timer show up on the screens, like, oh, my timer says right now I'm in downtime, but I'm not. So I better fix that, you know, that kind of stuff. You know, it's, I'm only a few days I'm not, so I better fix that. That kind of stuff.

I'm only a few days in, and we'll talk about it again, but I don't want to make this a podcast about Dave's space, but it is kind of fun to experiment right now, and I am learning kind of nice tricks as I go through this stuff. Well, it looks awesome. Congratulations. I'm thrilled that you have this space now now and you're able to make it yours but i think the real theme of this episode is where you have drawn the line in terms of what's good enough and what you would really want in terms of an ideal when you first

messaged me about this whole idea of perfectionism as it pertains to this space, I thought this was a fascinating concept because I've struggled with that myself. You look at what somebody else has and you think, oh, that'd be great if I could build something like that, but I can't, so I'll just leave it alone. But there's a lot of value in just thinking about what is good enough? What's the 80-20 here in terms of how can I derive a bunch of value from not a huge investment? And if you start thinking about that, I think there's some interesting things that you can apply. So maybe what are some of the ways that you have combated perfectionism as it pertains to building out indoor studios? And what are some of the

things where you just decided, no, this is good enough for me? Yeah, it really kind of snuck up on me. I've always felt like I had a handle on perfectionism, but I've always also been vulnerable to it. And we're going to talk about what that means to us in a minute and ways to avoid it. But one way that I never saw perfectionism coming,

but it did catch me as we were getting through this build, I really tried to not make my day about managing this construction project and more about, you know, doing my work. I hired people. I paid them well. I just kind of expected, well, they'll just do it. But of course, when you're doing something, space is personal. You know, you taking time to figure out where the Ethernet jacks are can really make your life easier.

And you can't just hand all that off. And then there's always little problem. The contractor I used is somebody I've known a long time. But sometimes he would need my help with getting something or another. And so it just suddenly started to become part of my life. And also, I could see the space taking shape. And the idea of this space was to give myself a dedicated space to work. But in the meantime, everything was chaos, right?

Like my main computer desk was in pieces. My nice big screen was covered in another room. The, you know, all like my stream deck was gone. Everything was in pieces. My, my nice big screen was covered in, in another room. The, you know, all like my stream deck was gone. Everything was just nuts and there was dust everywhere. And, you know, I would go up to the kid's room and try and like put a temporary thing there. But then like I had to do a video call. So I had to find like a shoe box that I could put my laptop on. So the camera would get higher and, you know, just like, it felt like everything was more difficult. And this is one of those things where journaling helps because without realizing it, I was journaling almost every day about, man, you know, things are doing okay, but you know, once I get the space, it'll be easier. And I can't wait to get the

space. I started going back and reading my entries and this was like a recurring theme. And I thought, wait a second, you know, you can't always be thinking about the future and when it's going to be perfect because it's never perfect. Right. And, uh, stop whining about when things get easier and just do your work every day, you know, and that really kind of helped me reset, which is a flavor of perfectionism. I didn't really think about, but I think in addition to applying perfectionism to the work you ship, it's very easy to apply perfectionism to the circumstances of your work or really any relationship. Once we figure this out in our relationship, it'll be perfect. The big lesson is it's never going to be perfect. Absolutely.

the big lesson is it's never going to be perfect. Absolutely. You know, I, as you were talking about the perfectionism and the belief that by this date, I'm sure you didn't say it this way, but I'm sure this was going through your mind by this date, I'm going to be in my studio and everything is going to be fine. And then that date comes and goes and you get frustrated. I thought I'd be in there by now. Yeah, no, that was part of it. Cause I kept hearing my, you know, my contractor was a two-week guy. It's like, how long until we're done? Two weeks. And that was like two months ago.

How long until we're done? Two weeks. And sometimes we got delayed a little bit because of just things that were out of everybody's control or the city inspector didn't make it or whatever. But yeah, there was a part of me that had set in my mind that I will be here by then, and then I wasn't. But it was even more than that. It was like dissatisfaction with the chaotic nature of things while it was going on.

I kept hanging my hat on the fact that one day this will be better. And so that gives me an excuse not to be bringing my A game right now. And that is a form of perfectionism, you know, waiting. I think perfectionism in a lot of ways is a prime way to delay and avoid. Absolutely. One of the things that I was thinking about as you were talking about it from a personal perspective, we've been dealing with this a little bit in the day job. about it from a personal perspective. We've been dealing with this a little bit in the day job.

We're working with a consultant, just business consultant, strategy consultant, and he brought on my radar this concept, the stock home paradox by Jim Collins, I think, from Good to Great. And it comes from Admiral Stockdale, where he was a prisoner of war, and he just had this attitude that things were never going to get any better. And a version of this applies with Viktor Frankl in Man's Search for Meaning as well, where he talks about people in the concentration camp who believed by this day they were going to get rescued. And then when that day came and went, they lost all hope. So the whole idea behind the Stockdale paradox is not to attach all of your hopes to this magical point in the future, which may or may not ever materialize. This is when everything is going to click and it's going to get easy.

And just embrace the way things are right now and try to make them a little bit better, which it sounds like you were able to do fairly effectively. I mean, it probably wasn't fun trying to find shoe boxes to raise your camera and stuff like that, but that's the kind of thing where you can fall into the trap of not even embracing those decisions because, oh, well, I'll just put it off. I'll just wait until the space is done and then I'll have the equipment and I'll have the environment and I'll have everything exactly the way that I need it. That's the time that I'm going to until the space is done. And then I'll have the equipment and I'll have the environment and I'll have everything exactly the way that I need it. That's the time that I'm going to do the thing.

So kudos to you for at least figuring out how to do the not ideal version with what you've had to work with in the meantime. Well, I wasn't perfect. There were parts that I did wait on because it was just too hard. But the thing that really struck out for me is the benefit of journaling because I was doing some of this stuff without realizing it. You know, you start to make these affordances and you've got this contract going on in your head and it's easy not to really be aware. And it was in going back and journaling and kind of reflecting on it in

meditation where I was realizing, oh, I see what I'm doing here. And it really took the reflection part to capture it. And once you're aware of it, you know, so often the trick to any of this stuff is just being aware of what you're going through. Then you can say, okay, well, okay, maybe it's fair to say that I can't do significant work on a field guide right now because everything is in chaos. But that doesn't mean I can't make videos for the labs or make good podcasts and stuff and just really kind of buckle down on the things that do make sense. And it felt a lot better once I addressed it head on. And I just wasn't really aware that I was dealing with at the beginning. But in hindsight, it really was waiting for perfect, which got me in that trap to begin with.

This episode of the Focused podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Go to squarespace.com slash focused and make your next move. Enter offer code focused at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your next move. Enter offer code FOCUSED at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. With Squarespace, you can stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything. Your podcasts, services, and even the content you create. Squarespace has got you covered. With Squarespace, you can sell your products in an online store. Whether you sell physical or digital products, Squarespace has the tools you need to start selling online. You can also get started with a best-in-class website template and customize it

to fit your needs. It's as easy as browsing the category of your business to find the perfect starting place, and you can customize it with just a few clicks. And if you want to start blogging, Squarespace is the place to do that too. Squarespace has powerful blogging tools to share stories, photos, videos, and updates. You'll be able to categorize, share, and schedule your posts to make your content work for you. Whenever you start a new business or idea, or maybe you just got engaged, you need to have a place on the internet to share information and help spread the word. And Squarespace is perfect for that.

It's so easy to set up and it's affordable and it has all the tools you need. I use it myself along with my family and our friends and frankly, anyone that ever comes into our orbit looking to build a website, I send them to Squarespace because it's just that good. So head over to squarespace.com slash focused F O C U S E D for a free trial with no credit card required. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code focus to get that 10% off your first purchase

of a website or domain. Once again, that is squarespace.com slash focused. And when you decide to sign up, use the offer code focus to get 10% off your first purchase and to show your support for the Focus podcast. Our thanks to Squarespace for the support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. All right, so we talked a little bit about how you encountered and had to fight against perfectionism when it came to the Endor Studios project. But maybe we should back up a little bit here and just talk about perfectionism in general. What is it? Nothing is done until it's perfect, right? That's the thing. And I feel like a lot of people wear perfectionism as a badge of honor. I mean, I remember working for attorneys that were like, I am a perfectionist. That's my thing.

And then the staff would learn that that was like, he liked people to say he's a perfectionist. So-and-so is a perfectionist, blah, blah, blah. And so often, it's, you know, is anything ever perfect, right? And it's, you know, is anything ever perfect, right? So there's a couple of things around perfectionism that are relative, right? How do you define perfect? Like when I worked, when I was in law school, I got a job clerking for a federal judge. So I spent a lot of time reading the briefs of some very good lawyers that they would write to the judge making their arguments. And I'm sure many of them prided themselves as perfectionists.

And so often I'd read the briefs and they wouldn't be very good. And I'd follow up the research and the research didn't really back up what the argument said. And I feel like everybody's got this relative version of perfectionism, but the insipid kind is the one that prevents you from shipping. Getting back to the thing, nothing is done until it's perfect. So first, what does nothing is done mean? And second, what does perfect mean? I've fallen into this myself in the past because the description that you had of the people who wore it as a badge of honor, the perspective you have when you take that approach is, well, I really care about this stuff and I want it to be excellent. But it's insidious because by trying

to make it perfect, you're actually working against the thing being excellent because the way to excellence, especially for a lot of the creative stuff that we do, where it's the repetition that produces the quality, if you hold off on shipping it until you think it's perfect, it's never going to be perfect and you've just made the cycle longer. So you have fewer of them in order to learn from your mistakes

and see the areas where you could improve things and make it better for next time. Yeah. And I would argue that's not just true with creative work, although what isn't creative work at this point? True. But you really have to get through the cycles. And I call it perfection paralysis, where you're a perfectionist and it never gets out the door. I've heard from people who want to do video stuff like I do or start a blog. And they're like, I've got a bunch of posts written, but I haven't published anything yet. I'm like, well, you don't know until you publish, right? I mean, and I get that you want it to be just right, but you can fix a blog post later.

It's okay. Getting feedback from other humans is really what's going to help you get better, and you're not going to get that until you hit that button. Exactly. And if you look at anything, look at any creator's work. I mean, if you go back and listen to early episodes of Mac Power Users, I was terrible at podcasting.

In fact, we recorded the first episode of Mac Power Users and it was so bad that we just trashed it and recorded it a second time. And Katie might have it, but I, I'm, I don't think that recording exists from the first time we did it. And it just takes a while and, you know, you gotta like, you gotta get it out there. And I really think, you know, in perfectionism, there's two ways that paralysis manifests itself. I mean, the one we've been talking about is using it as an excuse not

to ship things, which I think a lot of people do. You get close, but you never quite finish it. I mean, how many people have a novel that's like 60% complete, but perfectionism is keeping them from like finishing it. But I also think perfection is a barrier to starting projects. Like you're like, well, I'm, I'm not a good novelist. I've never written a novel. I'd like to, but you know, I can't get the research right. I can't figure out the right word processor. I mean, whatever, you can't get the perfect circumstances to make it. And, um, that really gets you in trouble. I mean, that's one thing I admire about you, Mike Schmitz is when you wrote your first book first book, you hadn't written a book before, but you just woke up

every day and you wrote a little bit. Eventually it got there. And I know it's not your favorite work of things you've made, but in some ways it should be because it's the thing that started you on this journey. Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up because I was thinking about that too. Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up because I was thinking about that too. My book that I wrote, I'm almost ashamed to share the journey because just the title book makes it seem like it's something that is very substantial. That's the picture I had in my head when I first got the idea to write the book. And because I am really smart, I figured if I'm going to write a book, I better figure out how to write. And all I did was show up every day and write and publish on my blog. And I did that for about eight months and just showing up every day

and writing for an hour before I went into the office. That's the habit that allowed me to write enough words to eventually package it into a self-published book. And you're right, I look back at it now and I don't like looking at the quality of the work because I've gotten a lot better. It's not just that book, by the way. I will share a link in the show notes here of an article I wrote a while back for this sweet setup about my sketchnoting journey. And I have a picture of my first sketchnote in here. And it is terrible. It's a stick figure, a bunch of words, and a couple drawings that you really can't tell what exactly those are.

can't tell what exactly those are. But the thing I had to get over was judging the work. With sketchnoting specifically, I had a real clear why as to why I wanted to do it. I knew that by sketching things, I was retaining more information. And so the art was secondary. It was really just the ideas that I wanted to solidify. And I did it enough that I've gotten fairly decent at it now. I still don't want to compare my work to some of the other people who are doing sketchnotes or bullet journal style stuff, because as soon as I compare it to somebody else's work, I feel like mine isn't very good, which there's a conversation to be had just there in terms of, you know, don't compare your stuff to what somebody else is doing. Just do the very best that you can and do it frequently and you will get better. Let me just interrupt

there for a second. I feel like that is a flavor of perfectionism where we get hung up on, yeah, but it won't be as good as what Mike Schmitz did. And that, I think, is something that helps lead you into this perfectionism paralysis, is comparison with other people. Absolutely. And that's the danger for anybody listening to this, I think. I don't want to profess that our stuff is great or my stuff is great, but I've been there before where you listen to something and you see something somebody else has done and you feel like I can't do it as good as they can, so why even try? And I would encourage everybody listening who wants to start a podcast or write a book or start sketchnoting or whatever it is

to just do it and disconnect from what everybody else is doing and just do what you're able to do and don't judge the result at the beginning just show up and consistently do it and you do it enough times and you'll start to see the growth and you start measuring where you are versus where you started. You see that gain and it creates the momentum and excitement to keep going. As opposed to when you compare your work to somebody else's, you have this ideal in your head of where you want to be or where even you think you should be. That's the worst kind. I've been doing this for a while. I should be at this level. Well, you're not. And you're never going to be. You're never going to be able to match up with that ideal in your head. And so if you see that gap, you can start to

question whether you've got what it takes. And you do, you just need to refine it. Yeah, it's so much healthier to compare yourself to yourself than to others. I mean, that's probably a little off topic today, but I do think that is one thing that can lead you to perfectionism. Let's talk about that for a minute. How do you get into this perfectionism trap? Um, uh, one of them is the badge of honor angle where like maybe somebody that you grew up around talked about what a perfectionist they are. And you're like, well, I want to be like that person.

And I want to care about my work. So I'm going to call myself a perfectionist too. And this is all relative. Because I think the badge of honor folks, some of them get it. And they still ship. But they still call themselves a perfectionist. You know what I mean? I think the scarier version of perfectionism is the the fear

base of perfectionism it's like well i am terrified to put this thing out in the world whatever this thing is and therefore i am going to use the label of perfectionism as a coping mechanism and say well yeah i i would like to do a novel too, but I am a perfectionist and mine isn't good enough yet. So I'm not going to put it out. Or, you know, I would like to make this thing, but the room isn't done being built or the whatever isn't ready for me to have the perfect circumstances to do it. So I just can't do it yet. I mean, that to me is the thing you need to identify in yourself. If that is happening, then you need to address it. You need to address that underlying fear.

You touched on something that's very important there with, because we just talked about Endor Studios and the huge investment that you made into this environment that is going to allow you to create stuff. And that's fine because you've been making stuff consistently for many years. But for other people, and I've been there myself, the tendency can be to procrastinate because you don't have the right tools or the right space. And that's the thing that you're talking about.

Don't wait until that perfect moment. Just make the thing. But it occurs to me that when it comes to procrastination and perfectionism specifically, there's a couple ways that this can manifest. And I think one of the things you talked about was the people who are able to ship anyways. And so maybe the term they would use is not perfectionist, but something like detail-oriented. But again, that's a slippery slope because you have to attach to the identity in order to follow through and ship the thing. I think there are a couple traps that I personally have fallen into when it comes to perfectionism that have directly led to that procrastination.

led to that procrastination. The first one is the fact that you want to start something new. And you have this vision for this thing, but you don't really know if it's going to work. And so you don't actually do the thing. You just talk about it. I talked about writing a book for a long time before I actually started doing it. And having fallen into that myself, I can see it now in other people when they do the same thing. They have this idea and they talk about it and they get excited about it, but they don't ever do anything about it. And it's almost like just talking about it is good enough. Because the minute that they try to do the thing, there's the possibility that it'll reveal the fact that they're not as good as they think they are. It's kind of like the fixed mindset sort of a thing, where if you fail at something, a growth mindset would say, okay, well, let's learn from the failure and let's figure out a way to do it better next time.

But for someone with a fixed mindset, failure is the absolute worst thing in the world because it directly attacks your identity as this type of person who can do this thing. It's funny how all this stuff fits together sometimes, isn't it? Yep, yep. I remember reading that book, Mindset, by Carol Dweck. And one of the examples that she uses in that book is John McEnroe, who was a phenomenal tennis player. But she argues that he had a fixed mindset because every time that he was going to lose, he threw a fit because he recognized that was a direct attack on his identity. so it doesn't i mean you can have a bunch of skill and still suffer from that that fixed mindset and that can be the thing that causes you not to put your thing out there but on the other hand and i thought this was so stupid the first time that i heard this but i've i've seen myself and others who have fallen into the other side where you have this idea for something and it's it has the potential to change your situation. And so anything new can feel uncomfortable to certain personality types. And I'm definitely one of those personality types.

So it's almost like I don't want to do this thing even though I know it will be good because it will force some change which might be uncomfortable. So in that sense, it will force some change, which might be uncomfortable. So in that sense, the perfectionism that causes you to delay shipping the thing is not in order to get it to a level where, okay, this is excellent enough for me to put my name on it, but you're just dragging your feet because you don't want to rock the boat too much. Does that make sense? Yeah. And we dilute ourselves by saying, well, I'm a perfectionist rather than admit I'm afraid of change or maybe this won't be as good and will change my image of myself. Maybe people will laugh at me, whatever. We say I'm a perfectionist. you're waiting for perfect in yourself or something else, you need to, that needs to be like a little red flag and say, okay, let's get to the bottom of this. I don't think it's actually perfectionism. Usually it's something else.

Yeah. A lot of it for me and my experience has been rooted in, in fear, whether that is fear of failure or fear of the unknown anything different can be scary i feel like something that really helped me on this journey was i grew up my formative years learning to play jazz music and jazz music is uh largely improvisational the there are no notes written down you know it's there is no perfect in jazz right you just you get out there and you do what you do you know and there are rules to improvisation and there are things that work and things that don't work but you know with the exception of charlie parker and miles davis there have been very few jazz solos where people say, wow, that was perfect, right?

So you get used to not being perfect, and you know that it's a process. And having grown up doing that, I mean, I started improvising, I don't know, 10 years old, and was very much involved with it through college. I think that gave me a set of muscles that made me less inclined to be a perfectionist because I understood usually things aren't perfect does that make sense it makes more sense than you realize

because I grew up playing classical violin so symphonies orchestras sheet music and it was a very precise it's like so I got really good at following the instructions, but was terrified the first time that I sat down to just jam with people. There's no sheet music. What do I do? Yeah. It just says C minor seven here. What does that mean? Exactly. You know, and you're right with classical music, because when I was in the honor band, they had me playing on the rare classical song that had a saxophone part i would go over and sit in and there was an accent there was a perfect way to play every note in that music

which was unusual for me it was kind of an interesting challenge but i uh it was a completely different mindset it is a very different mindset but i I would say that the thing that is most valuable in the economy and culture that we live in today is that ability to improvise. If I had to pick one of those two, that's the one that I would pick. And I've done both now for quite a while. Most of the stuff that I play with the worship team at my church now is that here's the chords and you improvise and you figure out how to fit in with what everybody else is playing, which kind of leads to another point here. When it comes to beating perfectionism, specifically within the realm of creativity, beating perfectionism, specifically within the realm of creativity, I feel like there's a lot of value in embracing those constraints. Since we're talking about music anyways, there's only 12 notes on the musical scale. And when you're playing with other musicians, you figure out the key, you figure out the time signature. All of those are quote-unquote rules you have to follow,

but it's actually those constraints that allow you to sync up with the people that you're playing with. That's the thing that unlocks the creativity and the ability to jam and come up with something fresh and new. Except as a former jazz guy, I wouldn't say those are rules you have to follow. They're just rules you have to be aware of. They're more guidelines. Yes. Right. But that's, I mean, that's the thing.

Like for someone who's a high fact finder like me, and I use that term fact finder that comes from the Colby Type A Index, one of those personality type assessments,

which I find fascinating. It's an indication of if you were left to your own, how would you work? I would do all the research, collect all the facts, and then I would make a decision and I would start to do something. And that totally comes through in the classical music background and really everything that I do. And I've found

value in being forced to figure things out on the fly. And so one of the things that I've found value in is in realizing that you really don't need to have everything figured out. You don't need a blueprint to follow with all of the steps identified. You really just need a direction that you're going in. You need to know what the next step is. And I've found a lot of freedom in allowing myself to not have all of those details. Once I understand what is best next, just do that thing. And then after that, figure out what the next step is. Yeah. And I just want to be clear on this part. I'm not saying fake it till you make it. I think that's a terrible idea. But I do think that you learn the rules, you make your moves, and you

publish at some point. And by publish, I mean the big term of that, whether it's filing the brief with the court or making the video or doing the sales proposal. At some point, you ship the thing and you just, you get the feedback loop. In fact, let's talk about that for a minute. The idea of perfectionism and creativity really are intertwined. And I think they kind of, I think understanding them, how they work together can help you avoid getting stuck in that perfectionism trap. Yeah, absolutely. I put together a YouTube video not too long ago, which was basically a distillation of everything that I have studied and learned, applied myself in terms of creativity. And it was the result of me presenting at the MaxD stock conference. So all of my slides are hand drawn. As I mentioned, my original sketch notes were garbage. These, uh, every single slide is, is basically using the style that I've eventually landed on in terms of, of sketch noting. Um, and some of the stuff that I put together in

those slides, the, the process of creating that really kind of solidified a lot of these things for me, some of these things we've talked about already. But the big one that just continues to impress me every time I think about it is that the quantity produces the quality when it comes to creativity. You really cannot overstate the importance of this. You need to just make something. It does not matter. Literally, you need to just make something. It does not matter. Literally, and that's not an exaggeration, it does not matter how good it is the first thing that you publish. What matters is that it's the first thing that you published. And now you've got somewhere that you can go from, something you can build on top of. And until you do that first thing, you don't even know what you don't know. And so the very best thing you can do is

just make and ship something. And then you can look up and you can look around and you can say, oh, well, I see, I could do this better next time, or I could tweak this for the next one. And you just keep doing that over and over and over again. And eventually you do end up with something that's pretty good. Yeah. I mean, you, you went through that, um, that was it part-time YouTube Academy? What do they call it? I forget the name of the school. Yeah. I mean, you, you went through that, um, that was it part-time YouTube Academy? What do they call it? I forget the name of the school. Yeah. And, um, one of the things they told you is you got to make a lot of videos. Yeah, actually that was part of the curriculum and I thought it was pretty brilliant. It's a six week course and they share material every week. But part of the course is they give you a theme

every week and you are expected to create, submit a video. They'll give you feedback on it and then you publish. And so six videos in six weeks, that sounds terrifying to someone who has never made a YouTube video before. And you can definitely spend way too much time creating a YouTube video. I've fallen into that trap myself. But just forcing you with those deadlines per the class to just ship something, a lot of people, a light bulb goes on after they've shipped a couple of them. And they say, oh, I now, after shipping a couple, have dialed in what pretty good looks like for me. I had no idea when I created the first one, but now that I've got a couple of reps and a little bit of feedback, the path forward becomes

clear. And now you can do it with a lot less effort and create something that's pretty good. Yeah. Marques Brownlee, who's one of my favorite voices in technology, he makes the MKBHD website or YouTube channel. He had a video after he had been doing it for a year or two. I don't remember the exact numbers, but he had like, after he'd been doing it a year or two, he had like a couple hundred followers. Right. And, and he made a video where he basically said, you know, I'm, I'm just going to keep making them and see how this goes. And he had been doing it a lot. And eventually, you know, now he has millions of followers and he's super huge and when you go to an apple event you see him there he's like a celebrity um but he just

kept publishing perfectionism never held him back but his videos are are very well done you know obviously he cares about the product and maybe that's something we should talk about is when we say you don't need to be a perfectionist that doesn't mean you don't need to pay attention to detail and do your best work, right? Correct. Correct. Yeah. That video, I know exactly which one you're thinking of. I will grab a link if I can find it and put it in the show notes. It was his 100th video and he had 97 subscribers at the time. And if you look at it, he looks like a little kid compared to who he is now. I forget exactly when he published it, but yeah, he just kept making videos and eventually the quality came. I mean, you could probably look at that video for the time

that it was created and the equipment that he had to work with and say, this is pretty good. But from another perspective, if you compare it to where he is now, you look at the equipment that he had to work with and say, this is pretty good. But from another perspective, if you compare it to where he is now, you look at the videos that he creates with the team that he's got and all the fancy equipment, and you're like, wow, this is so much better. That's kind of the natural progression though. When you ship things, you continually up the quality. It's not really even an option. I guess I suppose you could just do the bare minimum and just throw out garbage and believe that people are going to watch it and they're not. But if you just do the very best that you can, and once you've hit that point, say, this is good enough, I'm just going to get it out there, then I honestly believe that the quality is a natural byproduct of the quantity.

And you're right, we're not just saying, create something to create something. You do have to put forth your best effort. I feel like that's the difference between the growth and the fixed mindset. mindset. The fixed mindset is kind of like, well, I'm almost that I'm owed this because I have this natural talent inside of me and people need to recognize the gift that I have. That's not the thing that's going to create the quality. But instead, if you just ship something and then you look at it honestly and objectively and say, what are the opportunities for me to grow from this? They're always there. It doesn't take very long to look at that and say, oh, well, I could tweak this thing and I could do this thing a little bit different. And it's those small things, those 1% improvements that really add up over time. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Indeed. Rapid growth for your business doesn't

have to come with growing pains. When you have ambitious hiring goals, you need a partner who can help you get there. You need Indeed. Indeed is a hiring partner where you can attract, interview, and hire all in one place. So don't spend hours on multiple job sites looking for candidates with the right skills when you can do all of that with Indeed. Find top talent fast with Indeed's suite

of powerful hiring tools like Indeed's Instant Match, assessments, and virtual interviews. If you hate waiting, Indeed's suite of powerful hiring tools like Indeed's Instant Match, assessments, and virtual interviews. If you hate waiting, Indeed's US data shows that over 80% of Indeed employers find quality candidates whose resume on Indeed matches their job description the moment that they sponsor a job. And hiring all in one place is made so easy

with features like virtual interviews, which really save you time. You can message, schedule, and interview top talent all in one place. So join more than 3 million businesses worldwide using Indeed to hire great talent fast. Indeed knows when you're growing your business, you have to make every dollar count. And that's why when you sponsor a job, you only pay for quality applications from resumes in their database matching your job description. Visit indeed.com slash focused, F-O-C-U-S-E-D, to start hiring now. Just go to I-N-D-E-E-D.com slash focused. Indeed.com slash focused. Terms and conditions apply. Cost per application pricing

not available for everyone. Need to hire? You need Indeed. Our thanks to Indeed for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. Before the break, you were talking about, you know, beating perfectionism. And I feel like that's something I want to get into. Like, how do we deal with it? I mean, I think we all suffer from it a little bit. I wrote about perfectionism in the Monday Brief for the Max Barkey Labs, and I got a bunch of email back from some of my subscribers, and one of them wrote that she feels like the 1% takes her longer than the 99%. And that's a form of perfectionism that hangs you up.

And everybody suffers from this a bit. But I feel like more or less what I have kind of come to, the way I deal with this stuff is I build a workflow that I trust and I ship. Taking it back to jazz music, I learn the general rules, how things work. And then you just start blowing air through the horn and pushing the buttons on the horn right and eventually you get better at it and i think that's true for anything you can make whether it is a written product a video product or you know a work related thing but to me kind of the the mindset is get a system that i trust. As an example, a writing project. If I am going to publish something to the internet or send it out as an email, I write it, I proof it, I use Grammarly

to do a check, and I ignore its comma recommendations, by the way. And then I proof it again, then I have another person read it, proof it one last time, and then I publish it. Now, that's not a perfectionist workflow because it always ends with the publication. But it's a mindful workflow. That is a system I trust. I feel like by the time I've proofed it two or three times, I've had a computer proof it and a human proof it. It's ready to go.

And occasionally, stuff gets out and it's missing a word or something slipped through all those cracks. And you know what? I fix it. It's word or something slipped through all those cracks. And you know what? I fix it. It's not that big of a deal. Exactly. You mentioned a very important word there. I think you said it's a mindful workflow. I think that is the way to beat perfectionism is to be mindful about the way that you are working, do the best that you can. And then once you've hit that point where I guess diminishing returns, but usually you can tell when, okay, so this is 95% of the way there. And yes, I could continue to tweak this over and over and over again, and it might

get a little bit better, but this is basically good enough. And that's what you want to ship is the one that is good enough. And you want to go back and you want to make sure that you don't have any errors if you can, but you don't want to proofread it 10 times just to make sure that there isn't a grammatical error. That's what I used to do. That's an easy trap to fall into. And whatever it is that you make, whatever perfectionism is holding you up, I would recommend stopping and building a workflow. I know I'm such a nerd that that's my recommendation, but it works. You know, everybody listening has got different things that they ship. So I can't tell you, but I can give you a few examples in my life.

Legal work was largely the same thing. I always did my own research. I never trusted anybody else. I always checked. There's ways. And so the way you do legal research or writing is you make an argument and then you try and find case authority to support it. Well, there are bunches of summaries and online services that will say, well, you want to argue that this is what makes a contract. Here's seven cases that support it. Well, I never did that. I'd always go read the cases and, and figure out, I do my own research. And then I would have someone proof it for me. And I'd proof it a couple of times and then would go in. And I always felt like I did a pretty good job. Was it ever, was it ever perfect? Probably not. You know, the perfect brief, I don't know if it's

ever been written, but it was always good. One of the things that helped me there was that clerkship I did, because so much of the stuff I read was garbage. I realized that it doesn't have to be perfect. You know what I mean? A lot of it was bad. And I, you know, that was the opposite lesson for me. I never want to be the guy that writes a brief like this. I want judges to be able to rely on my research. And so it raised my level of performance, but it also freed me from the illusion that everybody else was doing it perfect and I have to be perfect too. Yeah.

The thing to take away from that, I think, is not to just try to beat the bare minimum or try to hold up your work against the gold standard in whatever industry you happen to be in. But there is value in asking the question, what is good enough? And I think everybody can answer that if they consider it for a little bit of time. And then that's really what you're going for. You're not trying to make something that is completely error-free, whatever that means, correct spelling, punctuation, whatever. Is this good enough? And depending on the industry, it's going to be different things. But the thing that can cause you to push forward with good enough is a schedule. So for creative work, this is simple. For a lot of the podcasts and things that we do, there's

deadlines. Focus comes out every couple of weeks. There's going to be an episode every couple of weeks. We're not going to go back and listen to it and, well, I misstated this thing and I should have said this a different way and record a whole bunch of fixes and do a whole bunch of editing just to publish every and wait a month and a half to release the episode. It's going to be good enough. The conversation is the thing that's valued. That is good enough. It doesn't have to be 100% perfect.

And that's one of the things that I kind of like about the medium is it's one of those forced constraints for me. If I was the one who was doing the editing, I would tweak it and tweak it and tweak it. And I've been there. I've done that. That was my original job with the productivity show for Asian Efficiency. I was in charge of all the editing. And I quickly realized that I could, especially with some sloppy audio, I could spend an hour getting it good enough, or I could spend 20 hours making it not even perfect, but up to my standards where, okay, that is as good as I can possibly do. And I realized after a while that no one really cared. There was no difference between those to the people who were listening to the audio. And so the thing that I learned was you just got to get it out there and you don't have to beat yourself up and make it

difficult. For creativity, that's easy because you could say, well, for podcasts to come out every couple of weeks or YouTube videos are going to come out every couple of weeks. Our YouTube videos are going to come out every couple of weeks. Our newsletter is going to be released every week. You can figure out your own schedule. But with a lot of other work, with the day job, for example, one of the things that helps us do this is not having those deadlines for things, but using a framework like Scrum, where you're measured on what you actually ship at the end of the period. You decide as a team, this is what we're going to try to do in this period of time. And we're going to eliminate as many roadblocks to actually getting that thing done as we can.

But we're going to loosely define what this being done means. But then at the end, once it meets those criteria, we're not going to sit there and tweak it for another eight weeks. We're going to get it out there and we're going to ship it and we're going to get some feedback from people once they actually see it. And then we can make another version if we need to, but we need to get it out there before any of that feedback makes any sense. If we try to jump ahead and project that feedback, most of the time we're wrong. Yeah, you know, the statement you made about determining what is good enough really landed with me. I feel like that might be another way to combat this. If you find yourself fighting

perfectionism, maybe sit down and write down a standard, you know, document it. Don't just think about it in your head. Like, what is good enough for this thing? And whatever the thing is, you know, document it. Don't just think about it in your head. Like what is good enough for this thing? And whatever the thing is, you know, what is good enough? What do you want to put out into the world? And figure that out and write it down and commit to it. And then that makes it easier for you to not get caught in perfectionism because at some point you will get good enough. And then you send it into the world and you start on the next one. It also makes it easier to delegate things to other people. So I have this thing that I've been doing for a while where I take these sketch notes of my pastor's sermons and I record these quick YouTube videos and talk through my thought process when I

was creating the notes. I was encouraged by somebody to do that at the beginning of COVID, and I thought no one would ever be interested in seeing these things. And it turns out that at least the people in my church think it's pretty cool. And my pastor thinks it's an awesome way for him to be encouraged that people are actually getting something out of what he's saying. So I've been doing these for a while. And I delegated the process of editing and publishing all of those videos to my assistant. I literally sit down, I hit record, I give her the raw files. And I had to identify these are the things that you use in order to make decisions, the guiding principles, the framework, whatever you want to call it, this is what you should be thinking about when you're the one who is making

these edits and making these call-outs and these transitions and things like that. And if I go back and look at the ones that she makes, they're never exactly the way that I would have edited them. And you know what? It doesn't matter because I've defined what is good enough. I've documented that and I've handed that off to her. And even though it's not exactly the way that I would do it, it's having to create that process that helped me come to grips with, you know, this is good enough so that I can hand it off to somebody else and I don't have to do it anymore.

Yeah. I mean, there's something to that and that exists in the world because you're willing to delegate and define good enough. I just think create a perfectionism, a couple of takeaways for today. Number one, perfectionism is not a badge of honor.

And number two is if you suffer from it and you know that things aren't getting out the door because of it, I would encourage you to sit down with a journal or meditate or do something to get inside your own head and figure out what's the root of it. Because I really honestly believe a goal to be perfect usually is not the reason. It's usually something else. Exactly. A couple other things I would add just for me personally in combating perfectionism. We tend to look at the results when it comes to creative effort specifically. So one of the things that I did with my journaling practice is I switched from saying, what did I accomplish today to,

did I do my best to, and I've got a whole video on this. This is based off of the daily questions model, Marshall Goldsmith outlines in the triggers book. So I'll put that link to that video in the show notes for people who are interested in this concept. But did I do my best to create today? Doesn't matter what it is. If I have a deadline for I am going to write a newsletter every week and create a YouTube video every other week and write a blog post every week and have all these podcasts that go out every other week, eventually I get to the point where it's just too much. I have all of these different deadlines. I've got a day job.

Something has to give. So giving myself permission to say, did I make the effort to do this thing today? That has been very freeing. And creativity isn't the only place that this shows up. It could happen with exercise too. You know, if I'm not feeling great and I get out there and go for a two mile run, that might be a really great day. That's a huge

win. But there are other days when I do like half marathons. So I'll do like a 13 mile run and it's easy. It doesn't require as much effort. It doesn't matter. I base myself on the effort, not the result. And then tied to that, I got to be careful with my commitments. If you go look at my about page on my website, I basically say I send my newsletter every couple of weeks-ish because I don't want to have the pressure of I have to do this thing on a regular schedule. I know that where I'm at right now, I can't commit to that. I'm going to do the very best that I can, and I'm figuring out ways to eliminate the friction and share valuable things from the books that I read

and things like that. But the minute that I give myself a commitment, especially if it's self-imposed, I tend to resent the fact that previous me is forcing current me to do this thing. Yeah, it's a challenge, man. It's a challenge you know we're all in this together i just got caught in the perfectionism trap two weeks ago with this whole build and uh hopefully you just put that one in your pocket and be aware and deal with it appropriately yep learn from it move on all right so we are the focus podcast you can find us over at relay.fm. We want to thank our sponsors today. That's our friends over at Squarespace and Indeed. We have a forum. It's in the talk.macpiresers.com website. We've got a little section there just for the Focus Podcast, so you can weigh in there. What is your perfectionism trait? Where do you fall into the trap and how do you get out of it? We'd love to hear from you about that. If you are a deep focus subscriber, we'll be talking today about me and my challenge

with analog versus eBooks. Otherwise, we'll see you next time.