The completion obsession: why finishing imperfect things beats endlessly perfecting things
My name is Alex, and I’m a perfectionist.
However, I still finish and ship imperfect things.
It changed my life.
You can be a perfectionist but rebel against this inner need…
And still succeed.
But when I was a perfectionist, all I ended up with was a graveyard of half-finished potential posts that could have helped hundreds.
While I perfected paragraph three for the 17th time, my mate Oliver published daily, built an audience, and made actual money from his ‘mediocre’ content.
Years of pain, trying to ensure everything was ‘right’, just kept me stuck.
Gradually, I learned that finished and flawed beats perfect and invisible.
The perfectionist’s curse.
Perfectionism isn’t about high standards.
It’s really about our fear of being rejected by another human.
When you demand perfection, you’re saying: ‘I’m terrified of criticism, so I’ll keep polishing until it’s criticism-proof.’
Newsflash, buddy: nothing is criticism-proof.
You need to get to a point where you’re okay with getting criticised. Right now, you might be equating a negative remark as a really really super duper bad thing.
But it really isn’t.
It’s a good thing. It means you’re playing the game. You’re gathering feedback.
And for those asshats that feel the need to be rude about your work? That’s on them. They’re projecting. It’s okay. Move on.
Successful people produce mountains of ‘good enough’ work rather than molehills of ‘perfect’ work.
The market cares about solving problems, not your standards.
Think in terms of problems solved first, ‘quality’ second.
Why ‘good enough’ wins.
When you finish quickly and ship:
You get real feedback instead of imaginary criticism. You learn what actually matters.
You build momentum instead of accruing a deepening sense of paralysis.
Most importantly, you develop consistent execution. That’s a habit.
One to be learned. But you can’t think your way to executing.
You need to do it. Over and over again.
I started publishing almost daily fifteen years ago.
I was surprised to see that the rougher posts I’d written more quickly often resonated more than overly polished ones.
I guess people connected with what was more raw.
Daily shipping got me out of my head and created opportunities I couldn’t have planned.
And even if I released more lower-quality stuff into the Internet, the algorithm would ensure those posts weren’t seen anyway.
So think abundantly.
Post more. It also gets you out of your head, because now any one post you write isn’t such a huge deal.
It’s one of many.
The completion advantage.
When you obsess over completion instead of perfection:
You outproduce competitors by 10x.
While they perfect project one (much of this is them literally thinking about doing the thing and not doing it), you finish ten.
You learn faster, and each completion teaches you a new lesson.
My completion system.
I have a system that says this this and this gets published on this day no matter what.
There’s no emotion here. I don’t base my output on my mood.
I follow my system and I allow my work to be 90% great.
I don’t hold back if it doesn’t seem 100%.
I view my projects as things that need feedback from the world so I can improve them later, which I do for many of them, especially courses.
You can create minimum viable versions of most things.
What’s the smallest version you could ship today?
Finish first, then improve.
The compound effect.
Less-than-perfect finished work compounds into extraordinary results.
Your terrible first blog post leads to your second. By post 100, you’re transformed.
But the perfectionist is still working on post one. Poor guy.
The market teaches you what good looks like faster than your brain ever could. So work with the market.
And the market is on the other side of the button that says ‘send.’
SO — stop perfecting, start completing.
Let’s face it. Your perfectionism isn’t serving you.
The world needs completed things, not perfect things.
Finish something today. It doesn’t need to be a damn masterpiece. Just finish it, and feel the feeling of the ship.
That’s the feeling you want to feel a lot. SHIP.
Ship it. Share it. Get it into the world.
Enjoy the huge benefits of prolific output.
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Alex
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