Letting Go of Perfectionism is Liberating
“I’m gonna write this essay later when I’m well-researched on the topic”.
“I will clean my room tomorrow so that I can sweep, mop, and change my bedsheets”.
“I will do the work tomorrow so that I can focus and finish it in one sitting!”
I used to have that mindset: all-or-nothing. I feel that I need to procrastinate doing something so that I can make it perfect. If I’m going to do half of it, why do it at all? That kind of mindset indeed helped me have a perfect result, but so many missed opportunities. I kept procrastinating and in the end, didn’t do anything at all. This mindset was reducing my productivity instead of increasing it.
One day, while doing my undergraduate thesis, I got stuck. I’ve seen all of my friends already having progress and getting countless feedbacks from their advisers while I couldn’t even complete that one damn chapter. I got stressed, of course, I tried to ask myself: what went wrong?
My friends and I had this kind of ‘meet-up’ where we were catching up about our progress and one of them said something that changed my life (lol, it literally shifted my mindset though), I didn’t realize it was that big of a deal until I changed my behavior. She told us that her adviser said ‘There is no perfect thesis, only the finished one’. I don’t know why, but something inside me changed.
It was just a passing comment, but that sentence kept replaying in my head even until I got home, opened my laptop, and did my thesis. I gave a deadline to myself that no matter how the substance of this writing, I need to give this version to my adviser by tomorrow. So, I did. I finally finished that chapter and handed it to my adviser the next day.
I knew it was not as perfect as I expected it to be. The journals I referenced weren’t as ‘amazing’ as I hoped to find them to be. But I know that if I didn’t give her it that day, I never gonna made progress. I realized then, that it was just one progress of another, I could revise it later. Because no thesis is perfect.
That realization was liberating.
I applied that new principle to other aspects of my life. I tried to let go of my perfectionism. It is better to finish this off instead of not doing it at all. As normal as it sounds, it was frightening to me back then. Because it was embarrassing not doing something perfectly and flawlessly.
I tried not to be perfect and care what other people going to say and how the result going to be. They are all in my head anyway. I can learn along the way and fix it while doing it.
It’s better to start instead of just imagining yourself doing it while waiting for a ‘perfect’ state of you to start. You will never going to be ready. So make yourself ready.
Perfectionism was my friend. I never knew that making mistakes is not a flaw, it’s just a progress, and a good one. That means you’re getting better and evolving.
Once again, letting go of perfectionism liberated me from my fear of starting anything that I want to do.
