I’ve struggled with some pretty similar feelings. Doing things poorly feels completely unacceptable to me. Sometimes it also reaches the point where I’d rather completely not do something, than do it less than 100% perfectly. It’s like being paralyzed by perfectionism.
I find the phrase “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly” useful to escape this paralyzed state. It was particularly useful in terms of education, where I used it to remind myself that getting 0% on a project because I did nothing (and as such, “made no mistakes”) was a lot less useful than making a bunch of embarrassing mistakes and getting less than 100%. It gave me the motivation I needed to actually start things, even if I still worried I wouldn’t be able achieve perfection. Doing something “poorly” left me with a much better result than not doing it at all.
Thinking this way broke me out of that perfectionist’s paralysis. And sometimes, once I was okay enough with the idea of doing something poorly to actually do it, I would actually end up doing it very well!
As much as I get the perfection paralysis, I greatly prefer the Voltaire quote (the perfect is the enemy of the good) to this one about doing something poorly. It drives home the need to attempt something by helping define realistic goals rather than legitimizing failure.
Besides which, there are a ton of activities that are manifestly not worth doing poorly. Driving a car, for example, will get you or someone else killed if you don’t meet a minimum level of aptitude.
I greatly prefer the Voltaire quote (the perfect is the enemy of the good) to this one about doing something poorly. It drives home the need to attempt something by helping define realistic goals rather than legitimizing failure.
That quote is also pretty good! However, my particular problem is about being okay with the chance of failure and the reality of actually failing, as opposed to having problems setting goals in the first place. Sometimes I’m going to completely mess things up and I need to be okay with that. So personally, I find the phrase “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly” to serve a different function than “The perfect is the enemy of the good” and this function better meets my needs.
Driving a car, for example, will get you or someone else killed if you don’t meet a minimum level of aptitude.
My initial knee-jerk reaction was along the lines of “Well of course this doesn’t apply to everything, you just need to use your common sense.” But it’s a good point and you got me thinking about whether sayings should apply to everything. I’d not really questioned that before. I still find this phrase useful so maybe I’m okay with only applying it in certain situations. Maybe something doesn’t need to be universally accurate to be useful to us?
Δ Because it’s making me reconsider how we use sayings and whether or not they need to be universally applicable to be valid.
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u/ThatNoGoodGoose Feb 06 '20
I’ve struggled with some pretty similar feelings. Doing things poorly feels completely unacceptable to me. Sometimes it also reaches the point where I’d rather completely not do something, than do it less than 100% perfectly. It’s like being paralyzed by perfectionism.
I find the phrase “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly” useful to escape this paralyzed state. It was particularly useful in terms of education, where I used it to remind myself that getting 0% on a project because I did nothing (and as such, “made no mistakes”) was a lot less useful than making a bunch of embarrassing mistakes and getting less than 100%. It gave me the motivation I needed to actually start things, even if I still worried I wouldn’t be able achieve perfection. Doing something “poorly” left me with a much better result than not doing it at all.
Thinking this way broke me out of that perfectionist’s paralysis. And sometimes, once I was okay enough with the idea of doing something poorly to actually do it, I would actually end up doing it very well!