Perfectionism is often seen as a good thing, and people should try and reach it whenever they can, but that may not always be true, being a perfectionist can stop you from finishing what you started or even not starting at all...

Quantity over Quality

You should aspire to make and publish so much, because only a subset of the things you publish is going to be popular and you don’t know which “thing” will be a hit because it depends on many factors that you aren’t in control of. Let’s look at some examples:

• A photography professor ran a month-long experiment in which he divided his students in 2 groups, the first had to take 1 photo throughout the whole month on which they will be graded, and the second had to take as they can and they were graded on the number of ones they took, surprisingly the group that had more time to polish up that single photo, on average, did worse than the one that took more photos in a short period.
• Irving Berlin wrote 1500 songs, out of which, only 25 hit #1, this perfectly illustrates that no one can know what things will become popular, if Irving had only published the songs that he thought were good, then he probably would have never gotten a single hit.
• Ali Abdaal said in many of his videos that the first 100 videos of any Youtuber are going to be crap, so Youtubers who are just starting out should focus on getting those first videos out of the way and not care much about their quality.

By applying the quantity over quality motto in everything you do, you’ll eventually reach the quality you wanted, to begin with, this is known as Quality Through Quantity

Finishing vs Publishing

When you create a thing (book, song, blog post) it's never done until you decide to publish it. you may find yourself stuck in a state where you never actually publish anything because you’re always seeking perfection. A thing is finished once you decide it’s finished, aka by publishing it. As an example I am about to publish this post even though, I know it’s far from perfect, I already spent a lot of time writing it and have shared everything I wanted to tell the world initially, if I keep going I know I’ll spend 10x the amount of time and finally publish a post that’s only 5% better instead I opted-in to publish it as it is right now and focus on making other cool ideas a reality

How do people publish so much

Successful people publish so much because they are working to publish not working for pleasure. Working for pleasure is very important but it only should take a limited amount of your time.

Raw can be better

In certain cases, polishing up can make things look worse, that’s because humans, by nature, love when something is raw = can have mistakes = is relatable.

• Pomplamoose, a band that’s very close to my heart has used a take where the singer forgot the lyrics and started laughing, most people loved this and thought it made the song so much better
• The National Arab Orchestra ran a program called Building Bridges Through Music where they would go to schools in the USA and teach them Arabic music to get a chance to sing in an orchestra, even though their Arabic accent was far from perfect, it made the experience much better by allowing me, an Arabic speaker who grew up listening to these songs, rediscover them in a new way.

So that's pretty much it, I hope you enjoyed my first write-up, I'll catch you in the next one!

if you've enjoyed this article,consider buying me a coffee. currently I am saving up for a better microphone!

Replies

Watchful Frog from

This is a fantastic post! yusuf.fyi/posts/perfecti…

Yusuf 💠 from

This is a reply to a mastodon post for testing reasons