Do it scared, do it wrong
This is your sign to imperfectly create your thing
Stepping into the unknown and creating a business selling myself and my skills has been challenging to say the least. The mental blocks I have uncovered during this process run deeper than I’d imagined. Before I attempted to cut myself free from corporate life, I would’ve never defined myself as a perfectionist. In startup land, one of the commonly quoted tropes is “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.” But I’m not a perfectionist…or am I?
Photo credit Scott Young
In the ‘80s, my father, who was working for the state, took a massive leap of faith to go off on his own. He had three children at home, so the stakes were high and success was mandatory. Needless to say, I’ve learned a lot from him. Recently I called my dad to get his advice and lament about how scared I am. His response to me was, “Well you should be scared. You wouldn’t be doing it right if you weren’t.” But dad, it’s so much easier to get a job where the goals are defined, where you know what your deliverables are, and then get a paycheck consistently. His response, “Yeah, but who makes the money?” Touché, dad.
I’ve worked at five startups in my tech career. During that time I’ve worked directly with CEOs, sat through all hands meetings, and have sat outside of the room where decisions are made (although I could hear what was happening inside). My main takeaway? Leadership has no idea what they’re doing. They do, however, have a room full of people who laugh at their lame jokes. And that’s not a dig, either. If I had a room of people who stroked my ego and laughed at my every lame quip the way tech founders do, I’d likely have much more confidence too. That said, they still have no clue what they’re doing.
Over the past couple of months I’ve had to define what my marketable skills are, design a website/landing page, work on my creative projects, figure out pricing, decide who I want to work with, stay consistent with writing about this process, etc. The deliverables that I’ve given myself feel like an uphill battle and I just cannot see the apex.
As I work on each of the elements, I keep finding myself tweaking the details endlessly. From photo editing, to website design, to editing my own work—the time flies by with what seems like little progress. My timelines on the project management software I use are all behind schedule, as I push the dates back and back and back. Even this weekly newsletter, which I promised myself to stay consistent with, has been late more than once. It’s been much easier to write about current events than digging through the abyss that is my mind, but I know that my audience engages when I dig through that abyss.
This is the unedited photo I’ll be using for my landing page. I took it by myself with the front camera of my iPhone XS. Is it professional? No. Does it look good enough? I think so. And eventually I’ll have a professional photo shoot with a proper glam team, and it’ll be replaced. It’s all in the *vision*, baby.
All of this being said, I’m just doing it all imperfectly. The first version of the landing page is not going to be up to my own standards, my first products are going to look very different from my 10th products, my writing is going to improve, my portfolio will expand — and a year from now my entire life will look different. I just need to check things off my list, even when they’re imperfect.
So, this is your sign to create your thing.
We’ll call it v1.
It’ll be imperfect, but it’ll be yours.
“Write as if everyone you know is dead.” — Joe Lansdale
This was a really good and encouraging article. Nice job.