Consistently Imperfect – The Climb #921

Tuesday 31st August 2021

One of the pieces of self-development I’ve been working on recently is my tendency to plan excessively. For a lot of the things I do this is a really good trait to have. I write quicker and to a higher quality when I have things planned out, either in my own mind or on paper.

But there’s part of me, especially when stepping far outside my comfort zone that wants everything perfect before I action those plans. I’ve been reading a bit about it in my latest piece of self-development on habits. I forget the terminology they use, but it basically can be surmised that everything is so carefully planned, the environment needs to be perfect before you hit the big green button labelled go.

As a result, I have a lot of projects that fail to get off the ground because one element gets a spanner in the works and the plan falls apart.

It doesn’t happen with everything for me. Some things I’m happy to dive straight into and be happily imperfect, but others I cannot action those ever-evolving plans unless every element is perfect.

One example of this is my plan to do a load of Youtube videos. Back at the start of July I was getting the intros sorted. I’d got my Twitter back so I could perfectly market these channels and everything seemed to be going well. And then my Desktop died.

Admittedly I couldn’t help a lot of that. The files and software I needed were on the desktop and I couldn’t work off a laptop. But the consistency I’d been building up with my social media postings, just dried up.

I watched a video today that again talked about compound interest of consistency. I’m hearing this again and again and the message is clear:

I need to stop consistently waiting for perfect and be consistent with the imperfect.

So today was all about trying to do that. I put a video together and announced two new video projects. I filmed it with a selfie cam, and the footage was shaky and all over the place. The lighting was crap and I stumbled and tripped over my words…but I got it done.

There’s part of me that hates it. I can make better videos and a large part of me wanted to scrap it and do it again… better. But I told myself that if I do that I will never start… so I accepted imperfect to get the message out and the projects started.

Posting the video, announcing it across my socials and kicking everything off felt pretty scary, but I told myself that it’s unlikely to get much attention at first. That’ll give me some on the job experience as I work on future videos, and by the time people watch, they will be a lot better.

It ended up being a really busy day as a result. I need to write checklists of things I need to remember when launching a video. I might do that tomorrow as I have another video going live. Plus, I have a livestream planned for Thursday as well.

My plan is to go pretty hard at it for a couple of weeks to build a body of content and then go to once a week. With the video on one channel, the livestream, and subsequent replay on Youtube, plus posting the story, that gives me a lot of content throughout the week.

But we’ll see. Whether these projects succeed or fail is less of a concern for me over having a project where I can test being a bit more spontaneous. It’s imperfect and I’m going to make loads of mistakes, but I really want to push myself at being consistently imperfect.