Tag: perfection

Shit…it’s not perfect

Posted on by philipdodson
An imperfect sketch of the Gustav Eiffel bridge in Porto

I’ve got a sore hand at the moment and I have been now, and in the past, using such situations as an excuse not to do something. 

For example, I’ve been wanting to restart my blogging, but I have told myself it will have to wait until my hand is better. 

The fact is, I can always type one-handed or I can do what I’m doing now and that’s dictating it and then copy, and post it to my blog site. 

Our mind will sabotage anything and it’s up to us, our true self, to choose to simply witness our thoughts rather than become them. 

Of course the dictation thing is not perfect, but who needs perfect? Well, I’ll tell you who needs perfect…our mind. 

The mind uses perfection as an excuse not to do something we will say things like ‘oh it’s not gonna be perfect, so I’m not going to do it’. 

Additionally, no one likes perfect. We prefer imperfections as it’s the crack that lets the light in. 

Perfect doesn’t exist anyway because the moment you perfect something there will always be a step beyond that, another level of perfection to achieve. Exhausting isn’t it?

Perfection just keeps us trying harder, working harder, being good boys and girls, going to work, doing our thing, paying our taxes, taking on more stuff at work, until we reach this Nirvana of perfection. Then it will all be ok, but it won’t because you can’t ever reach it. 

If instead we can embrace imperfection. We become happy knowing it won’t be perfect then that removes the pressure, takes away the excuses and allows us to do work free. Pressure is what kills our work with overthinking, complicating, and fear.  It all comes from trying to be perfect. 

No one wants perfect they want our imperfections that creates the things we love the most. 

That’s today’s blog done, no excuses and it’s not perfect. 

Do bad work

Posted on by philipdodson

Do bad work, it is the only way we get to good work.

If we are too frightened to do anything as we fear it will not be perfect, then we will never get to doing work that matters, we will never learn and improve, and we will never do even better.

We will hide behind perfection and fear, we will not show up and we will make excuses as to why we can not do.

Doing is a thing of this moment and it requires us to step away from thought, from the mind and its sabotaging fears. We have to be vulnerable enough to try and trying means we will not be sure of the outcome, so we just have to do and that will mean some bad work and that’s OK. When we do things that fail or are not right then we learn and we do even better next time.

If we keep doing the bad, then the good comes, if we never do the bad, we never get to the good. Being prepared to do without concern, means we will get better and better. We will overcome the fear of doing and that is the breakthrough, that is the key to unlocking our true potential to create our very best work.

Keep doing the bad work and being brave enough to share it. Sooner rather than later, we get to even better work. The more we keep going the even better the work gets. It removes the block, it takes away the fear and builds a habit of being vulnerable enough to share the best we can do right now. As we ship more and more of what we can do we learn and improve.

Or we can stay stuck with fear, too frightened to do and then we’ll never learn, we’ll just hide behind perfectionism and put our shields up to prevent any exposure to risk. We will not reach our true potential because we didn’t show, we didn’t take the plunge, we stayed safe and avoided uncertainty.

Bad is good.