On Perfectionism
I’ve been in a patch of “writer’s block” for some years now: few photos, few poems, little writing of any kind. In a sense this blog is an attempt to break out from that; and in the process of launching I have rediscovered some valuable lessons. Perfectionism can be a drawback.
Before making the first post, I first had to choose the perfect blogging platform. Would it be Movable Type? Or would it be Wordpress? Whichever choice I made, what would that say about me, as person? The effect of all this was that I had to test-drive quite a few blogging platforms before I could even write a single word.
I eventually decided to just bloody well settle on Wordpress and be done with it. But of course, I wasn’t done with it. No, first I had to configure the site just right: themes, permalinks. Agonizing over the names of categories, and what would be a category or what would be a tag. The choices are crucial! Heaven forfend that I create two categories today only to discover that next year I write a post that could be categorized as either!
It didn’t stop there. The URL had to be decided on so that I could maximize all future usage of the nagel.co.za domain. Of course, a bland URL like blog.nagel.co.za wouldn’t do, so I had to settle on a title for the blog so that I could use something like swappingthoughts.nagel.co.za. But using the blog name , of course, would mean that I had to be very sure of the blog name I want to use – that would need to have a clear idea of all the kinds of things that I would write in future.
Let it go, let it go. Just freaking write the first post!
But the first post has to be profound… If, in future, this blog actually has a readership, and someone clicks on a “first post” button somewhere, the very first post I ever wrote has to reflect favourably on whatever it is that I do with this blog in future.
The perfect is the enemy of the good, indeed. Better to just start with something, and improve it as you go along.
Interestingly, that sentiment is core to Agile Development as well. And at work, I’ve been carefully pushing for a more agile development style as well. Does this mean that my work life is going to positively feed back to my creative life?
Wouldn’t that be nice.