Is Your Creative Flow Being Distracted By Seeking Perfection?

You always want to strive to do the best work that you can. No matter what it is that you’re doing, do it to the best of your ability. These are good concepts to live by, but often times they can be misinterpreted.

Phrases like “to the best of your ability” and “the best work that you can” don’t mean that what you’re doing has to be perfect, but rather as good as you can get it. If you’re allowing perfectionism to pull you off track, it can seriously halt your progress and have some rather adverse effects on you.

Perfectionism is essentially a state of mind in which you start to pick out every small flaw in your work, stemming from a desire for the project to be perfect. This is an entirely unrealistic goal, and the more time you spend trying to get it to be perfect, the worse it’s going to get.

The greatest masterpieces in the world have their flaws, and there is not one thing that is perfect. By striving for something unattainable, you could work for years to try to get something exactly right, and still be unsatisfied with it.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t put any effort into it, but give it your best shot without going overboard. If it takes a few days, that’s fine, but once it starts to get into a few months of work with no progress, you’re going overboard.

While there is the danger of you wasting too much time chasing after perfection, there’s also the negative mental aspects. If you’re consistently dissatisfied with your work, you’re going to end up feeling pretty bad about yourself.

You might think you’re bad at your job or that you’re not putting in enough work, and it’ll only be detrimental to you. Instead of second guessing yourself and wasting time, produce something that’s satisfactory to your standards and be proud of that alone.

There’s no reason that you should overexert yourself just because you think something’s good, but it could be a tiny bit better. At some point, even if you were to reach a point very close to perfection, it would come with what’s known as diminishing returns.

If it takes you five hours to produce something that your client is happy with, but it takes you years to produce something that’s slightly better, but close to perfect, then the difference is negligible. You will have spent far more time doing it, making that work not worth doing in the first place.

Know The Difference Between Beneficial Distractions And Saboteurs

It’s true that some distractions can be beneficial to your creativity. Getting immersed in something that’s related to your creative work or doing something that lets your mind wander can help you be more creative and can often result in some better ideas.

This isn’t always the case, though, and you need to be able to distinguish the difference between distractions that are actually benefiting you and distractions that are holding you back from working as you need to.

For example, if you’re writing a science fiction novel, and you’re running out of ideas, it could be beneficial to watch some science fiction shows with the pretence that you’re trying to come up with new ideas.

It can help inspire you and show you things that you hadn’t thought of before. In this case, the distraction is beneficial. It helps you gather new ideas and gives you a bit of inspiration that you can channel into your work.

However, if your job is to come up with a more efficient system for your job, then a science fiction show isn’t really going to be that great of a diversion. Instead, it’s just going to eat up your time and make you less focused on the task at hand.

Distractions that have nothing to do with what you’re doing are often not that helpful, but that’s not always the case. If you were trying to come up with a new logo for a company and you were sitting outside letting your mind wander, that might not have anything to do with the logo directly, but it can still be a good way to open up your mind to new possibilities.

In this case, even though it’s not related to your work, it can still be pretty useful. One method of determining whether or not a distraction is beneficial to you is to keep a sort of distraction journal.

Log the amount of time you spent with each distraction and make note of how many quality ideas actually came out of that time you spent. If you spent 3 hours watching a show and only came up with one decent idea, it’s probably not that worth it and is just eating up your time.

If one hour spent outside produced three or four decent ideas, however, that’s a different story. At that point, that could be a worthwhile distraction that’s actually helping benefit you relative to the amount of time you spent on it.

Recognize When Your Creativity Has Got Out Of Control

Creativity is something to be admired and cherished, because it can be so incredibly helpful for you. It can give you new ways to do things, new ideas for projects, and bring a lot of light into your life.

However, there is such a thing as being too creative. You need to find a balance between creativity and actual implementation in order for those dreams and ideas to come to life.

You can spend your time 24/7 daydreaming, and during that time you will no doubt come up with some great fascinating ideas. The problem is, it’s almost irrelevant how good an idea is if it’s not put into action.

If you have an idea that would work well, but you don’t implement it, then you’re just wasting your creativity. You should use focus and hard work in conjunction with creativity so that you can actually benefit from your creative work.

Implementing your creativity is tedious work, and it often requires a lot of focus and dedicated effort. If you’re more creatively inclined, this will be more of a hassle for you, but it will be well worth it if you’re coming up with quality ideas.

There’s a certain feeling of happiness that comes with watching something that you dreamt up actually take shape and become a successful idea. It just means you’re going to have to take some time to get it there.

You might be concerned that stopping your creativity to work for extended periods of time will hinder your creativity, but that’s not exactly true.

First, it means that your creative dreams won’t just go on to die out, but rather they’ll actually come to fruition and mean something rather than just staying an idea forever.

Additionally, you may be surprised to find that you can actually become more creative after a break. If you’re constantly using creativity, you may become burned out after a little while.

Taking a bit of a break to work normally can reinvigorate you when you get back to it, making you even more creative than you were before. It’s important to balance hard, boring work and creativity as much as possible.

Strictly doing either one will lead to some negative consequences. All work makes you less creative and you’ll start to get repetitive, while all creativity doesn’t really give you much to work with if you’re not putting things into action.

As you can appreciate, a lot of this is dependent on the way you think and if you want to know more about developing a good mindset for success, please click on the featured resource below for a free Strong Mindset report; download, read it and take action 😊