Finish

Finish identifies perfectionism as the biggest enemy of your goals, in order to then help you defeat it with research backed strategies to get things out the door while having fun, taking the pressure off and cutting yourself some slack.

When I started my blog, I spent hours upon hours tweaking the design. I downloaded themes, cropped pictures and figured out CSS hacks, only to have the majority of my first few readers tell me that my color scheme sucked big time. It took me at least a year until I finally realized: I suck at design and that’s okay.

Going all in on my lack of graphic skills allowed me to focus more on what I could become good at: writing actual content. Especially as a solo entrepreneur or artist, the temptation to do everything yourself is enormous, because at first, you have no other choice.

However, the sooner you can move away from this task-hogging, time-wasting mindset, the faster you can put more time into the core activities that you’re good at and that drive your venture forward. By strategically choosing which areas you’ll accept being incompetent in, you can prioritize your strengths.

What’s more, there are plenty of options to deal with these trade-offs. For example, I now handle design in several ways:

I never prioritize it at first. I pick something out of the box and go. Later, I hire someone to help out with the first profits of a new project. I always set constraints in how much time I spend on visuals.

Strategic incompetence, I’m telling you. It’s a thing!

I’d love to tell you I’m always ahead of schedule with my posts, but I never am. I write about whatever fascinates me that week, and so there’s always urgency to publish new pieces in time for the newsletter. Whenever I finalize drafts early, there’s a little voice inside my head right before I want to hit ‘Publish.’ It says stuff like “are you sure this is good enough?” and “don’t you want to edit it some more?” or even “you know this is going to flop, right?” As creators, it is our duty to shut that voice up and smash the launch button. The reason this voice is so hard to silence is that is has a point: if we spent more time on our work, it would be better. However, 9 out of 10 times, 9 out of 10 people won’t notice, because we’re reaching for the last few percent missing for perfection, not fixing some huge flaw. Of course we never have this problem when we’re out of time. Work always fills the time we make available for it, so when…