Lowering The Bar
It’s easy to tell yourself you’re not a perfectionist. I mean, you don’t have a color-coded planner or a desk that’s meticulously organized. You don’t spend your nights aligning your socks at a 37-degree angle to the sun. So how could you possibly be a perfectionist, right?
Well… Then why are you still waiting for the “right time”?
Why are you waiting for everything to be just right before you start?
Maybe you call yourself a high performer. You see your high standards as discipline or pride in your work.
You’ve built your identity around excellence, and somewhere along the way, you forgot to be easy on yourself. You forgot that you’re also human.
You’ve already imagined the final product, and with that vision comes all the expectations of what it “should” be. Very quickly, that vision feels impossible to reach. The task becomes too heavy. Reality hits you, and you freeze.
You see, the final product doesn’t exist… until it does.
The only thing that exists is “the process”: the messy, unpredictable, human process of discovery. You have no idea what the final outcome will look like, you only have a glimpse of what it could be.
Imagine you’re drawing. If you start by trying to make your first sketch fully rendered and perfect, it’s going to be awful.
Every artist begins with rough shapes and guiding lines. Messy sketches that look nothing like the finished piece. Those first marks are how you discover what the final artwork should become.
When you finally finish it, you’re just as surprised as the person seeing it for the first time, BECAUSE YOU ARE! That’s the magic of creating, following through on something messy, uncertain, and yours.
Lowering the bar of entry is how you build momentum, momentum is what we want when it comes to taking on any project. because it allows us to overcome any hurdle we may come across during our process of discovery. There’s no stopping this train.
Every meaningful project begins with messy, imperfect first steps. My first YouTube video was a MW2 Sniping Montage that I recorded on a camcorder my Dad bought me from Toys”R”Us when I was 12.
Credit: 12 Year Old Me
Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all started in garages. They didn’t have billions in funding or limitless resources. They just had a vision (not a finished product) and they started.
They worked every day toward that vision, shaping it as they went, building momentum.
So, lower the bar. Drop the expectations. Start with what you have and have fun doing it.
Want to start a YouTube channel? Use your phone.
Want to lose weight? Skip one meal a day.
Want to run a marathon? Start with one mile.
It’s better to live a life full of messy starts than one of stillness and regret because you were waiting for the perfect moment.
You don’t need perfection, you need to start. You got this, just keep going.
