Fighting perfectionism

#motivation #writing

Aloha folks 🤙🏽

I have to admit, I really suffered from this in the past (and still now from time to time). And to be honest, I think it’s not bad in every aspect. I’m pretty sure it helped me having such high standards for me when it comes to quality of code or products. But of course, most of the time there is nothing like perfect, especially being a developer, there are always different ways to solve a problem, and everyone has it’s own preferences when it comes to how they build their solutions.

The biggest problem with perfectionism though is that it stops you from getting things done and putting them out. And this is one of the most important things at the same time. You shouldn’t be afraid and make as much as you can. Only this ensures you will become better and grow your skillset. Waiting till something is perfect will make you wait forever. There’s always gonna be the feature that you want to implement first or optimize it or this little bug that 90% wouldn’t even notice. It’s important to overcome this feeling and improve later on. Don’t get me wrong, it’s super important your code is well organized, structured and makes sense, but there comes a point, where you need to make a cut and put it out there.

As a little challenge for myself, I chose this blog. As I mentioned before, I already tried to write a blog, but that one died pretty quickly 😀
So, this time I wanted to focus on what’s important having a blog. The content. So I decided the goal is to have my first post out on that weekend on sunday. Everything has to be adjusted to meet this goal. This means, no headless-cms – react – server-side-rendered – on netlify deployed monster of a blog, but just a dead simple WordPress instance with a free basic theme and some css twerks. Don’t get my wrong on this, I think personal projects are one of the best ways to try and learn new things, and it maybe would’ve been a good possibility. But also that would’ve meant I need to sit on it for some weeks until I have it all figured out. Now, as you apparently can read this, I have my blog set up and I am writing a post the third week in a row. I can always choose to migrate it now and try out different things on the side, and I can even write about this in my blog then 😉

So, did it work? Yes, but no, but yes 😀
I met my goal and set everything up on that weekend and wrote my first post. I’m of course not satisfied a 100% with the design and theme and everything. But I’m ok with it for the beginning as there are just a bunch of loyal readers anyway for now (props to you when you’re reading this now ❤).
And I can always sit down for some hours and change this now, implement a new theme or even build my own frontend for it. But the important thing is, as I mentioned above, I’m putting things out the third week in a row.

It’s always easy to get distracted by every small little thing you want to be perfect, but most of the time this just stops you from being productive. I want to encourage you to take the step and show your stuff, even though it might not be perfect for you yet. The feedback you will get will help you 1) gain some motivation and momentum again and 2) show you what is important for your users / followers.

That’s it for now, see you. Sometime. Somewhere. 🤙🏽