Goddess:

I have perfectionistic tendencies, and I had to learn about "satisficing" (the perfect is the enemy of the good -- or in my case, the perfect is the enemy of the ever getting the fucking thing written).

Yes. I am often paralyzed before I even start.
How did you get over it?

My dad was a perfectionist, and it drove my mom crazy. When dad painted a room, the ceilings were edged perfectly, without the slightest bit of wall color on the ceiling. As mom said, the trick was actually getting him to start. Her idol was my next door neighbor, a dentist, who would go along with one brush to do the wall, and another to touch up any mistakes he made on the ceiling.

Well, dad was a pilot during the war, and an engineer afterwards. In both professions, mistakes are costly, maybe fatal. Dad was a very good engineer, and I must assume, pilot.

My neighbor was a nice guy, and a not so great dentist in terms of technique. My mouth still hurts thinking about it. (He was also a very generous guy who provided a lot of services to the poor for free.)

I'll let you conclude which family was happier. It's not a trick question.

Some times, good enough is good enough. Sometimes, the margin for error is small, and the cost of failure is high, and perfection is worth striving for.

Mistakes are how we learn. Learn and do better next time. Unless they are the sort of mistake where there isn't a next time.

the perfect is the enemy of the good -- or in my case, the perfect is the enemy of the ever getting the fucking thing written

I had to learn this too. Perfect engineers don't ship. Or to put it another way, "sometimes you just have to shoot the designers and send it out the door".

The trick is deciding when :)

Yes. I am often paralyzed before I even start.
How did you get over it?

I really work to live rationally, and just hearing about satisficing was extremely helpful. I realized how much sense it made, that I was burning myself out by focusing on one tiny thing -- at the expense of the whole.

Perfectionistic tendencies come from the irrational expectation that you should be perfect, and that there's something wrong with you and you'll be judged harshly (shame) if you aren't. I realize that I'm human (worked on reminding myself of that) and that I am fallible, and that's okay, and that I am usually pretty good once I get started. I make myself work in timed stretched. I just start and work for 25 minutes. (I used to do an hour, but 25 minutes is better. It seems more doable.) You then get into a flow and see that something is coming together in some small way, or you just have some crap on the page to edit.

It's not easy, but I force myself to just DO things, to just start.

This chapter I've been working on made me feel stupid, because I just couldn't figure out what would be so simple for so many people -- how to organize it. It's actually an important part of the ideas coming together. What I did was just keep working, and yesterday afternoon, I talked to my editorial assistant about the problems I was having, and said, "Let me just show you two pages," and when I was explaining them to her and the problem I was having, the solution came to me.

If there's nothing on the page, however, there's nothing to edit. And for me, there's also some shame in having done nothing. It's really a NIKE thing -- just do it. Screw the feelings and just do the work.

Hope this helps.

Also, Albert Ellis' book, A Guide To Rational Living, is good on perfectionistic tendencies (thinking to overcome them).

http://www.amazon.com/New-Guide-Rational-Living/dp/0879800429

I was raised on the notion, "Do it Right, or Don't DO it at All." I was paralyzed my my mistakes.

One day, I had an epiphany. I decided to do things good enough. As soon as I quit holding onto perfection, my life bloomed. If I made a mistake, I could now cheerfully correct it since I hadn't spent hours agonizing over the whole process. I had more energy to actually get things done.

Well I let go of perfection, the quality of my work actually improved. If I could go ahead and complete a task imperfectly, I could find some satisfaction. I could even embrace errors as part of the learning process. The next time I did the task - surprise, I did a better job. It was a lot easier to develop skill this way rather than try to create perfection the first time through.

I made up my own saying. "If it's Worth Doing, It's Worth Dong Wrong."

Regarding the video: I think what's happened is we've moved from a society where only a small portion of the population was "educated" to one where nearly everyone goes to college. College became a place for job training, not for becoming educated. The people who were educated served two purposes in society: 1) they educated the next generation (hence his statement that the goal of education seemed to be to crank out more college professors) and 2) they functioned a society's "canary in a mine shaft", they could say "Hey, you're making a mistake, you better STOP." Albert J. Nock goes into this much better than I can.

Maybe what we need is something along the lines of the art and music schools (disciplines which he notes are under-represented in education) or the technical/trade schools. You want to do finance, you go to a finance school. You want to be a computer programmer, you go to computer school. You want to be an auto-mechanic, you go to auto mechanic school. Then, regardless of how you earn your living, if you want to be educated AND have the basic intelligence to do so, you go to college and study math/science/literature/history in broad terms.

@Miss Alkon: "It's not easy, but I force myself to just DO things, to just start."

Amen to that! I have to remind myself of that, too. It's way too easy to become paralyzed by a task with a lot of unknowns in it. But you'll never know the unknowns unless you're plowing forward. When I'm teaching classes or coaching people on our software, I tell them don't worry, they'll get a feel for what works and what doesn't soon enough.

What I have learnt to do as a perfectionist is to knock out the first draft - it doesn´t have to be just right, because its only the first draft, it can include stuff which is a bit clumsy because I can´t quite see how to say it right.

Then I put the first draft down and attend to other things. When I go back to turn the first draft into finished product, a day or so later, my mind has somehow worked out how to iron out the wrinkles and give me something that is pretty much just right.

Then I have to ship it before I waste all day doing ten unnecessary rewrites.

PS The first and last steps are the hard ones.

Stevenson Phillips, an acting coach I worked with privately (not because I wanted to act but because I wanted to be less terrified out of my boots on TV), told me: "80 percent of the time, you're smart and funny; 10 percent of the time, you're not so smart and funny; the other 10 percent of the time, you're dumb and full of shit." But, he said, it amounts to my being mostly smart and funny, and nobody's taking notes. And what stops me from being good is worrying about how I'll do. I need to just know that I know my stuff and go out and have fun talking about it.

I talked to my editorial assistant about the problems I was having, and said, "Let me just show you two pages," and when I was explaining them to her and the problem I was having, the solution came to me.

I often have similar experiences when faced with difficult problems. The process of explaining them to others often illuminates the way forward.

Read that once in a Murphy's Law book. Hated it then. Hate it now. It's disgusting.

So - how far off from perfect do you aim?

I mean, c'mon. You could be elected.

I've done software development and break/fix for years.

I rarely have to resort to it anymore, but the best way to break a logjam in my work is to sit down and write out a flow chart.

For the writer's in the crowd -- perhaps going back to an outline for the whole book, or that chapter and making sure all the points that you want to hit are in there is a solution.

Of course school kills creativity. It was designed to make factory workers. When factory work was the most relaible and some of the better paying work a body could get,this was a good thing. But the type of work that is valuable has moved on while the educational model remains the same.
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The best cure for writers block for me has always been the "brain dump." Just taking an hour or so to put all the words and ideas on the paper without paying attention to grammar, logic, or spelling. Once everything is in front of me where I can see it with my eyeballs I have a much better time of getting it organized.

Everyone done in here? Good, cause I wanna spoil it all...

Blaming the school for your education is like blaming the supermarket for your diet.

My mother said that. She was probably quoting someone great, but let's not look it up and ruin it.

And I've always thought "creativity" was overrated... Especially as Americans (and only Americans, I hope) discuss it with their children.

They're all, like, verbal about it. And really direct. As if it mattered.

"I hope my children are able to be creative in their careers/projects/whatever."

"That's very creative, Dakota! Now try to do it without cutting the cat's forehead open...."

It's uncouth. It's like going to pick up your prom date and saying to her father: "I must say, Mr. Hutchinson, your daughter's got a really thunderous rack hanging off her ribs. All the guys on the football team told me this was really going to be a rilly fulfilling night! I'll have her back by dawn, flushed, disheveled, and in need of a soapy shower...."

This verbal sluttiness about it seems mostly to be about making children recall fond episodes of childhood play with colorful crayons in the living room as Mom brought hot cookies and cold milk in from the kitchen.

It discounts the two facets of creativity seen in my own life.

First, it takes a lot of effort, often painful work. I've actually been involved in a few creative enterprises. I've put some flourishes on lesser corners of these projects m'self, but mostly I've watched the people who are truly creative. Some of them were gifted, but all of them put in incredible hours. They chewed through resources they couldn't afford, including the patience of people whose support they needed. It was good when it was over, but as the paint hit the canvas (or whatever), it was not a cheerful time.

Second, creativity shows up when it's needed. People are as creative as they need to be... And that includes the insidiously mundane ventures which our media feel compelled to describe as creative entertainment.

...But not only those ventures! In every field, nature —human nature— goes with the time-tested patterns until someone hits a wall. And then, and ONLY then, are the rewards present for people to risk creativity.

The really gifted artists, the ones who put themselves in that situation through habits of good character, are almost never leading lives that make them popularly admirable.

If creativity is truly important to you, be stingy with the word. There's a lot of mediocrity out there.

I dont know what Obama plans but then again so far I have not agreed with anything Obama has done.