If you ever found yourself with an idea, a reason, and a spark of motivation to start your million-dollar idea, did it take you long before you moved on to the next step of the process? Or did you stay on that one thing only to continuously keep adjusting it or to eventually give up?
I use to have the surface-level understanding that I was a perfectionist, but I didn’t really grasp the detrimental consequences that came with this bad habit.
The fact that so many of us have amazing ideas that never see the light of day is so disheartening. And one major contributor to this is because we all want to be perfect. This is because we want our product or service to be the best out there, we want our image to be perfect and the way we advertise these things need to be perfect too.
Now by all means it’s not a bad thing to be wanting high expectations from yourself or your venture but you have to see it as it is… and that is that it will never be perfect to everyone. laborum.
Recently, I had a client that has successfully built a product from the ground up, created a platform, and has all systems go for success. The only downside is, he is not getting the sales that he wants or deserves in contrast to the enormous amounts of time, energy, and effort he has contributed towards this.
The first thing I noticed once he shared his progress with me as he was stuck in the pursuit of perfection and the idea of the “perfect image” that will represent his brand. However, this was beyond his skill level to represent himself and out of his current budget.
If we start the timeline at the beginning of “the birth of the idea” and bring it to the present. His biggest concern was looking to see what he could fix or change what he had already done. Because in his mind, if he wasn’t making automatic sales, the business model must be broken.
You see he was looking back on how to improve and not forward on how to succeed.
I raised the question if he had run ads yet (an extremely obvious question to ask). He told me “no” when asked why, he relayed that he needed newer images and a new video to advertise. After looking at his current gallery, I couldn’t help but think the images he had were professional and really decent for his needs (especially starting out) and were sure to get attention and raise interest.
However, he insisted that they needed to be new. So here he is with an online platform with little to no traffic, a wear house full of product, a goal that is to the moon, and a handful of sales. All because his current media gallery isn’t perfect and he won’t advertise till it is.
So if you ever find yourself in this scenario, look at it this way.
If I say to you that I truly believe that “the Kardashians” were the best on-screen family to ever grace this earth, well, I’d be right… Depending entirely on who you ask that is. Now on the other hand if your one to say, that you can’t stand them. Then you probably feel that the style of entertainment they provide is not perfect and doesn’t suit your personal taste.
This show, regardless of what it promotes, could not sell to you, they could not persuade you to watch and they could never entertain you if you did. However, 20 seasons of that show is proof that some people out there can not get enough.
Perfection is based entirely on an individual level and that is your level. You try to achieve perfection and assume others will judge you off your efforts if “your” level of perfection is not met… I’m sorry to tell you, people will pick you to bits regardless of how hard you try.
What you think is perfect, someone else will tell you confidently how you are wrong. And that’s unfortunately the hard truth.
So if striving for perfectionism is one of the key obstacles standing between you and a finished product, then ask yourself in an absolute manner, do I want this completed or do I want to move on. If you want to complete it. Then do what’s necessary to complete it so it’s readable, watchable, usable (this one is within reason, of course) cause if we all had to wait for the iPhone to be released in its perfected form, we’d all still be waiting for the first one to be finalized.
As Jim Rhon said “fail fast, learn fast” cause you don’t want to be failing slow over the next 5 years only to find out that all your perfection was rejected.
So create, advertise, adjust, repeat. Don’t wait and don’t waste time because you need the perfect shot or you’ll just be delaying success or failure. Either way, you’ll need to learn and grow from them so just get it done.
© 2021 James Osborne-Byrnes. All rights reserved.
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