It has been a really long time since I’ve written anything on here, and I can assure you it isn’t due to a shortage of ideas. No, the reason why I don’t write anymore on this blog is because I resent it. Yep, I absolutely hate it. Don’t get me wrong, I love self improvement. I continue to work on improving myself every single day. I talk about my self improvement ideas with my friends and family until their ears bleed. So I can confidently say I haven’t lost my passion for it.
So if it isn’t a lack of passion, what is it? This is a question I’ve asked myself a lot over the last year. And I’ve finally figured it out: perfectionism. My perfectionism is what causes me to procrastinate writing anything. I’ve placed so many standards on my writing that I’ve taken something that I am supposed to enjoy and turned it into something I hate. What standards did I put on myself?
- Each article must be 400-600 words long (for SEO purposes)
- Make sure all grammar and punctuation is perfect
- Article must have a clear introduction and conclusion
- etc etc etc
Basically, I wanted myself to create articles that a school teacher would approve of. But this is a blog, this isn’t an essay. The main reason why I have this blog is to help as many people who are seeking to improve themselves as I can. And because my perfectionism ultimately prevents me from writing, I end up helping nobody at all.
So today, I am making a promise to you and to myself that I will no longer try to create perfect articles. I will try my best to make them good, but that’s it. My new mindset is if I write an article it only has to help one person. Meaning, of the thousands of page views each article gets overtime, only one of them has to actually benefit the reader. If just one person benefits, to me the time it took to write that article was well worth it.
So what’s the lesson you can take from all this? Understand that the perfect is the enemy of the good. I wanted to make “perfect” articles so much so that I ended up not writing as much as I would’ve liked (to avoid my inevitable disappointment). And looking at my traffic numbers, I can tell that I haven’t done a good job. I gave up the “good” for the “perfect.” And as a result, I got neither. I’m done doing this to myself, and you should be too.
