Perfectionism Killed my Creativity

I did too much. And I did nothing. This is the story of how being a perfectionist got me stuck. (Photo by John T on Unsplash)

Failure is an opportunity for learning—about inaccurate pictures of current reality, about strategies that didn’t work as expected, about the clarity of the vision.

The Fifth Discipline, Peter M. Senge

Writing every day is my most powerful creative tool.

Every day? You could ask.

How come you are writing every day and you publish on your blog every week? You could add.

And how come your latest article was in April? We’re almost in June. You could infer.

Yeah, I have excuses. So many I could fill you with them.

I wouldn’t even need all of my excuses, I could just mention the pandemic.

You know, that insignificant event taking over the world, recently?

But the truth is another.

Perfectionism.

This killed my publishing schedule.

While, when I write in my personal diary, I flow like oil. I can write from 1’000 to 5’000 words per hour. I’ve reached 250 days of continuous writing for 350’000 words. I can go on and on. I frequently reflect on my work (no, not necessary on why I am not blogging). I think aloud to better form some thoughts. It’s working in understanding better. Who? Me.

And, frequently, I talk (to myself) about those complex and abstract concepts that float in my mind. Day and night.

Which ones? I can hear you say.

Come on, the usual ones: UX Design, Design Thinking, UI Design, Design Systems, management, leadership, Organization Design, parenting, sustainability, Systems Thinking, complexity, emergence, feedback loops, causal diagrams, unintended consequences, Donella Meadows, Peter Senge, Systems Change, social innovation, facilitation, teaching, training, learning, consciousness, the mind, space, writing, thinking, publishing, building an audience, writing the next article, and some other 357 things.

Writing the next article. Yes. Let’s talk about this for a moment.

I’ve been “writing the next article” for more than a month, now.

It’s the next episode of the “OsservAgro” saga. It was one of the most stimulating experiences I had in 2019. I have a mountain of notes and ideas about it. And I committed to myself to tell its story. My experience. How I did it. What I’ve learned. What we did together. What we could do.

But I wanted to be a historian. I wanted to tell exactly what happened, who said what, what I replied, what I thought, what I did, and what we achieved at the end.

That is not an excellent way to summarize an experience. I am afraid.
The more I recalled about the first workshop I facilitated, the more I wrote.
The more I wrote, the more details I recalled.
The more I wrote the more ideas, facilitation methods, tricks, reflections came to my mind.
And the more I wrote.
So, after a month, what was a 1’000 thousand-words essay is now 5’000.

And I feel exhausted. And nausea comes to me if I reopen the third draft. I don’t want to publish it. It’s too long. It’s not flowing. And, the worst thing, I feel it’s… incomplete.

That is exactly where I am now. In the meantime, I’ve collected (just about) 1 extra million ideas. More drafts, more articles waiting to be written. The idea of creating a “digital mind garden” came to my mind because now it seems to be fashionable.

I’ve been dreaming about creating my Memex, my Wiki, my Second Digital Brain, since 1982. Not happy with being stuck, I did it. Now.

I am doing everything now. So, I am doing nothing. This is the truth. This is where I am. And this is what I am publishing now.

Will this writing help me? I’ve written it in 17 minutes, in one shot. I was “in the flow”. I reread it only once. I made only a few corrections.

Will I get unstuck? Am I getting unstuck?