Nothing holds me back from my daily, consistent creativity more than perfectionism. I don’t know why this is. I only have this lovely character defect in certain areas of my life. I don’t particularly mind a sea of shoes, books, and board games on the living room floor, for instance. (Much to the dismay of my poor wife.)

I spent many years without realizing I even was a perfectionist. I always thought perfectionists were successful, upper-middle-class doctors, engineers, and lawyers who pushed, pushed, pushed themselves to academic excellence and achieved amazing personal success. I never thought of a guy like me because my life is far from perfect. Over the years, I’ve made poor choices, switched paths, gotten in my own way, regressed, had many cases of the fuck-its, and have had to start all over. That doesn’t sound perfect.

It isn’t. But perfectionism is the obsessive part of my brain that chatters away like a monkey on meth, telling me my creative work isn’t good enough, how influential people hate it, how inconsequential people love it (and they don’t count). That meth monkey comes up with gems like:

“You didn’t do enough today.”

“Sure, that script was good, but you can’t keep up that quality.”

“People resonate with this, but it’ll never sell.”

“Your eyebrows are weird.”

What do my eyebrows have to do with anything? Nothing. Meth monkey’s just an asshole.

Here’s what Psychology Today says about perfectionism:

A fast and enduring track to unhappiness… What makes perfectionism so toxic is that while those in its grip desire success, they are most focused on avoiding failure, so theirs is a negative orientation.

I love this. It reminds me of meditation and three states of mind. Sitting in meditation makes me aware when I’m pushing away from negative states, when I’m running towards desirable states, and when I’m simply… being.

My creative work can’t simultanously strive for success and avoid failure. It will go into lockdown mode. If I’m creating at all from this place, it’s with the editor in the driver’s seat. Everything comes out safe, unremarkable, and boring.
But when I’ve allowed the creative work to just BE, the end results have surprised me and taken on shapes and vitality I could never have come up with on my own.

So how can I create this payoff with more consistency?

The first thing is to show up every day. I learned this, too, from meditation. I can unequivocally say meditation has changed and bettered my life. I can feel the difference. The biggest shifts have come when I sit every day— even if it’s for five minutes. This beats the hell out of, say, grinding out an hour once a month. My mind and body react to consistency and to steadily kept appointments. If I want to write, writing every day for short bursts is better than a marathon session every full moon.

I have to have the right frame of mind to show up, though:

Jonathan Harnum, The Practice of Practice:

Lower Your Standards— Setting easily achievable goals is probably the best way to enhance your Ass Power [as in, getting your ass in the chair], because with a small, specific goal in mind, you’ll be more likely to sit down in that chair, even if only for a few minutes.

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird:

Short Assignments… all I have to do is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame. This is all I have to bite off for the time being. All I am going to do right now, for example, is write that one paragraph that sets the story in my hometown, in the late fifties, when the trains were still running.

Lowering my standards and short assignments. When I follow these ideas, I will sometimes dive in for longer sessions, sometimes not. But showing up every day demystifies the creative work. I become like a runner logging miles. Wonderfully, it becomes more workaday. When that happens, I have a much better chance at staying out of the results. If today’s session produces crap, there’s always tomorrow. And the next day.

Next, I make mistakes. Big, glorious mistakes. I have to let myself play in my creativity like a child dunking his hand in the wet fingerpaints and swirling them all over the paper. However, making mistakes is tough for me. I’ve never been a good beginner. When the going gets tough, I want to pick up the Xbox. So I have to think of a few prolific folks:

Stephen King, On Writing:

With the door shut, downloading what’s in my head directly to the page, I write as fast as I can and still remain comfortable… what you should probably be doing is writing as fast as the Gingerbread Man runs, getting that first draft down on paper while the shape of the [story] fossil is still bright and clear in your mind. When composing… the trick is to let nature take its course. If you don’t like it later on, fix it then. That’s what rewrite is all about.

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird again:

Shitty First Drafts. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it.

Clarke Peters, actor on The Wire and Treme:

You need to make mistakes in rehearsal because that’s how you find out what works and what doesn’t.

Ego reduction is the key to allowing myself to make mistakes. I’m hard on myself. It’s good to remember that I’m not the problem, the problem is the problem. The above quotes remind me to fly through the work (quicker than my inner critic can catch me), fearlessly produce 90% chaff if it means I get 10% wheat, and experiment with failing— chapters and even whole bodies of work— so I can discover what succeeds.

When I finish something and show all of you the goods, there are four possible scenarios. I've listed them here, from best to worst:

1. You and I both think the work is genius. Doesn’t get any better than this, right?

2. You and I both think the work is garbage. Uh… oof, this doesn’t feel as good as a.), but at least we’re both on the same page.

3. I think the work’s a hot mess, but you think it’s brilliant. Whaaa? You’d think I’d feel fabulous with this, but if I don’t know how I did what I did, it’s actually pretty maddening.

4. I think the work’s fantastic, and you think it’s gruesome. This feels like that dream where you’re in the middle of a cocktail party and you suddenly realize you’re naked on the toilet in front of everyone. You know the one? Cocktail party? Toilet? You haven’t… you’ve never... uh, no, me neither. I was kidding.

It’s easy to fixate on these four outcomes. I’m doomed if I’m thinking of them while I’m trying to create. That’s where the psychotic perfectionist voice comes in and tries to talk me into shaping the work towards a) or b) and runs like hell from c) and d). The work will probably be catastrophic.

To help me appease that inner perfectionist (because he ain’t going anywhere) here’s one more quote. It’s a long one, but worth it…

Ira Glass, This American Life, on creativity: 

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it's normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take a while. It’s normal to take a while. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

Guitarists call their practice time “woodshedding”, as in, “I’m going back to the dark, hot, lonely woodshed to work on this piece. When I come out, I will blow your mind.”

I take these quotes and thoughts in when I show up for my creative work and then I add one final piece to keep me out of my perfectionism. It’s a contract.

Whenever I start a new project, learn a song, become a beginner in some new endeavor, or crank out one of these blog posts, I write this down:

I, Brendan O’Neill, will attempt [fill in the blank]. This will test my Zen-iest patience, my current skill level, and will challenge what I think about my work, its value, and my worth as a human being. I therefore will treat myself with fierce kindness and compassion, show up despite the fear, anger and embarrassment and keep the door closed while I work on this. Upon completion, I then contractually reserve the right to show my efforts and outcome to NO ONE and toss it if I wish. I hold the prerogative to never let it see the light of day. If I make this decision, I hold no judgement, and I immediately start a new project. Rinse and repeat.