letting your work do its thing for your audience, instead of for you

When you’re creating something for a customer or an audience, perfectionism can really get the better of you. You can revise and revise and then hold on to your product for yet more revisions. Another round of polishing. Swapping commas for semicolons and then swapping back. Adjusting the kerning between the letters on slide 5. Adding a button to the UI.

I read in the last couple years a helpful prompt for getting out of this pattern. An author said something along the lines of (and I’m paraphrasing a lot here)

“The [product] is never finished, strictly speaking. You can always write another draft. But if you keep writing drafts forever, your readers never get to be your readers. They never get to read and enjoy and critique the thing you made.

So there’s a point where it’s worth asking yourself: Has this piece done all it can do for me? Is it time to let it do what it can for others?”

If you’re still struggling to get out of a perfectionist doom loop after asking yourself this, remember that your next revision will likely be way more useful - way better - if you do it based on the feedback of someone else. Get yourself a “reader” before you get to revising again.

-eric