Imperfect Perfectionist

When I was younger, I coded and created projects because it was fun. Once I started going to college, it became a chore; a job that I didn’t want to do. Everything had to be perfect. I needed to get the perfect grade. Coding was no longer enjoyable, and I started to lose interest.

I needed to consistently work to impress. My instructors needed to accept and grade everything I was working on. I was forced to spend too much time on deliverables that I didn’t enjoy; entity-relationship diagrams, data flow diagrams, project plans, schedules, and software reference architectures.

Writing was another hobby I enjoyed, but everything needed to be perfect there as well. My website needed to be SEO compliant; I needed to follow as many standards as possible, sometimes completely changing the meaning of my work just so it would become SEO friendly. Even while I was drafting work in Microsoft Word, I was already thinking about how I could format it and fix it to become SEO compliant.

It led me into being an all-around perfectionist that never accomplished anything. Everything I did, I had to ensure it received the approval of others, whether it was my instructor, peers or even myself. It didn’t matter whether I was writing an article, developing a program or creating a screen name for my gaming channel on YouTube. It needed to be perfect. It needed to be something that everyone else liked. I needed to be recognizable and distinguishable from everyone else.

Eventually, it translated over to all areas of my life. I used to enjoy playing video games a lot, now I just wanted to be perfect. I needed to get the strategy guides to ensure I got every treasure, fully explored every room and found every secret boss. Gaming became stressful. It prevented me from posting my gaming videos on YouTube because they weren’t perfect. I wasn’t able to compete at the levels that other influencers did. I wasn’t a professional gamer, and I wasn’t a professional programmer. The imposter syndrome hit hard.

It’s hard to move forward when everything needs to be perfect, and once you go down that path, it’s easy to forget about the past; to forget where you’ve come from, and what you used to enjoy. It’s hard to even recognize that you’ve strayed down that path, and when you do realize, you’re so far down the path you can no longer see where you entered. You can turn around and look behind you, but all you’ll see is a dirt road littered with your past failures. The road extends seemingly into infinity both in front of, and behind you.

If you continue limping forward the road will lead into infinity. Nothing will ever be perfect. There is no way to get to the end of that road. However, if you turn around and start walking back the way you came, you will, sooner or later, reach the point of the road where you got on (for me that was college). At that point, you can take one of the other roads. You can leave Perfection Rd. and get onto County Rd. Dunn.

There’s nothing wrong with striving to be good at what you do; to be the best you can be. I want to start a blog that will be both helpful and enjoyable to others. But more importantly, I want it to be enjoyable to me. I want to design software that I think will be useful, and fun, but it doesn’t need to be enterprise level. I don’t need to create every development document. I don’t need to complete a DFD, ERD, or SRA document for every personal project I work on, and I don’t need to spend a week creating a schedule in Microsoft Project. Even though it feels wrong not to do so.

It’s no longer fun, or useful. Nothing will ever meet the idea of perfection. I’ll never meet that goal, so I’ll continue to struggle. I’ll also start looking for the imperfections in other people, reading others’ posts online and pointing out their flaws. Sooner or later that constant struggle to become perfect makes you hate yourself, everything you do, and everyone else around you. You become angry, and you don’t even realize it.

There’s no shame in taking pride in what you do, but there’s also a time to relax and enjoy the things right in front of you; enjoy the here and now. Don’t worry about going back to fix everything; to make it perfect. You can’t move forward when you’re constantly going backwards.

Notice: This post isn’t SEO compliant.