Imposter or Master?

Procrastination through perfectionism is the most dangerous form of creative resistance. It can convince you you’re a master, when it turns out you’re an imposter.

You can live in this deception until the day you die—and your masterpiece dies along with you.

So, how do you strike a balance between shipping your art, and making your art the best it can be?

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First, understand exactly how perfectionism works against you. Perfectionism holds your art inside you because you’re convinced that you still need to make it better.

While you’re perfecting your work, you’re not shipping your work. Shipping is a scary thing. It puts your work out into the world, where it can be judged by others.

The dangerous thing about this is that you now have what seems like a perfectly valid excuse for not shipping your work. It feels better to tell yourself you need to put on the finishing touches than it does to admit you’re just afraid of shipping it.

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Shipping is especially scary when you know that your work is imperfect. If you’ve never put your art out into the world, you can’t know how valuable shipping can be. You can’t know the way it makes your anxieties dissolve. You can’t know the way it frees up your mind to start work on another piece. You haven’t seen how each new work somehow manages to be just a little bit better than the previous work.

Because you can’t envision the way shipping changes your work, and your relationship to it, your perfectionism just intensifies. You begin to see imperfections where there are none. This works in a vicious cycle: Your fear of shipping heightens your awareness of imperfection, and that perceived imperfection makes you scared to ship.

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I’ve been working on a new book for years now. Naturally, I’m always asking myself if I’m an impostor, or a master.

On the one hand, it’s perfectly normal for a book to take years to write. On the other hand, I want to be sure I’m not fooling myself with perfectionism. Here are questions I ask myself to make sure I’m on the right track:

• Can you envision the next milestone? Not having a clear picture of what you’re shooting for causes anxiety that makes your perfectionism worse. What is the next milestone you’re shooting for? Is it a series of blog posts? Is it a rough draft? A proposal? If you don’t know, your chances of making a reality your nebulous vision of a masterpiece are slim.
• Can you envision the steps involved to get to that next milestone?If you can clearly see the steps it takes to get to your next milestone, you can confidently take action to make it a reality. The best guideline for this is the question what similar projects have you done before? Pushing yourself is a part of growing, but your vision of the steps involved should’t feel like a black hole. If you’ve hardly written more than a grocery list in your life, and your next milestone is a finished novel, you’re probably overshooting.
• How unfamiliar are the steps needed to ship the work?Maybe you can clearly envision the steps, but there are parts of the process that are completely vague to you. Maybe you’ve never uploaded an ebook to Kindle. Maybe you’ve never recorded a track of music in your life. If there’s a way to practice these steps before you get to these parts of the process, they can add clarity, reduce anxiety, and in turn keep your perfectionism in check.

If the milestones aren’t clear, the steps to get there are muddy, or the details of those steps are intimidating, you have little chance of making your work real. The best strategy is to scale back to a smaller deliverable. Attack your masterpiece from the flanks before storming the city.

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Bringing your art into the world is not for the faint of heart. You have to fight against perfectionism, while still making quality work—and you need to keep yourself from burning out along the way. If you remind yourself to be realistic about what you know and don’t know about making your work real—if you scale back when you need clarity, you can give your mind the raw materials for breakthrough insights, and finally make your masterpiece.

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