Your Perfectionism Might Be The Biggest Obstacle To Success

A lot of us as musicians, artists, and creatives identify as perfectionists.

We wear our perfectionism as a badge of honour because we think it means we're striving to attain a certain level of excellence and that excellence will garner us attention, praise, and ultimately, success.

But being a perfectionist is not going to guarantee your success. In fact, your perfectionism might be the biggest obstacle to your success.

We think that our perfectionism is fuelled by our commitment to excellence. But it's actually fuelled by our fear of failure and rejection. It's really more about wanting to avoid criticism.

We think if we can just make our music or our video or our social media post perfect, obsess about every detail no matter how minuscule or trivial or irrelevant, leave no stone unturned, then it will be unimpeachable, beyond reproach. No one will ever be able to criticise it or you.

We think that by being perfectionistic, we demonstrate mastery, and thus we avoid failure and criticism because no one criticises a master.

It's important to realise that a master is not someone who avoids failure.

A master is someone who has failed more times than the beginner has tried.

Therefore, it's your willingness to be imperfect that paves the way for your success.

By being perfectionistic, you're robbing yourself of opportunities to learn, to grow, to improve, and to connect with your audience. I'll give you a recent example from my life.

Over the last 3 months, I've been upgrading my coaching skills by doing live online training every day, coaching other coaches from all over the world. There are coaches in this program who are way more experienced and successful than me. And so every day when I get on the training, I feel some nervousness and discomfort, like a 5 out of 10. But I've been deliberately getting out of my comfort zone. Why?

Because I've identified that this opportunity doing live training every day is the next step in my growth.

And I've recognised that my perfectionism, rather than helping to pave the way to my success, is actually an obstacle to my success.

If I was hell-bent on doing coaching perfectly, I wouldn't show up for the training every day.

I'm learning new things in the training, and it takes a while to get the hang of them - it’s a bit clunky at the moment. So I'm not perfect and there's the possibility of judgement and criticism.

Similarly, if I was hell-bent on doing these videos perfectly, I probably still wouldn't have done the first one. I've been doing them weekly and sometimes twice weekly for over two years now.

By being willing to be imperfect, I've gotten so much more experience and improved my skills much more than I would have if I had clung to my identity as a perfectionist.

This is why I say I'm a recovering perfectionist. That tendency is still there, and sometimes it gets the better of me. But I'm conscious of it, which means I'm able to get leverage on myself so it’s not running the show all the time.

Our perfectionism is intimately tied to our fear of failure. We're afraid of making mistakes and getting criticised for them.

If you're making mistakes or not doing things perfectly, that means you're learning. You never do anything perfectly or even well the first few times you do it.

Ultimately, you overcome your fear of failure by having a goal worth failing for; worth taking a chance on. You need to have a dream so big that the accomplishment of it makes up for all of the so-called failure required along the way to achieve it.

If failure is not an option, then neither is success.

There is no failure - there’s only feedback.

Feedback is the critical step in the learning process. The only way we learn and improve is by getting feedback. And if you're not willing to try something and “fail”, you'll never get the feedback and you can't take corrective action and reiterate and improve.

As an independent musician in the New Music Business, you're living in a more entrepreneurial reality. You have to find and build your audience. You'll have to test your ideas to see what resonates with them. Expect that 4 out of 5 things you try won't work. That doesn't mean you've made a mistake, or you suck, or you've failed, or that you're a failure. It simply means the feedback is telling you that you haven't found the right thing yet, or that this isn't what your audience wants from you, or it needs some refinement.

The only real mistake you can make is not moving forward, not putting yourself or your content out there.

If you wait until all the traffic lights are green before leaving home, you'll never leave home.

Brene Brown describes perfectionism as a 20-ton shield that we carry around thinking it’s protecting us from judgement and criticism, but what it’s really doing is keeping us from being seen. And you can't build your audience if people can't see you. It’s as simple as that.

Part of your sacred duty as an artist is to get your music to the people who need to hear it.

There are people out there right now who are ideal superfans for your music. People who would be touched, inspired, and transformed by your music. Don't let your perfectionism deprive them of that experience. Be willing to be imperfect.