On making & Perfectionism
I am a recovering perfectionist. That might sound alarming coming from a stationery designer, so rest assured that my recovery doesn’t involve suddenly becoming laissez-faire about typos and spacing! But I’m not just saying it in the job interview, “oh-my-biggest-weakness-is-actually-a-huge-asset” kind of way, either.
As a creative, nothing has been more debilitating to my work than the fear of making a mistake.
There’s a popular piece of writing advice that says, ‘The only thing you can’t edit is an empty page.’ I’ve been working hard to incorporate that mindset into my work flow: to begin fearlessly making; to worry less about mistakes; to tamp down imposter’s syndrome; to discover my own authentic voice instead of trying to fit a mold that was never meant for me.
Here are a few tenets that I’ve found to be particularly important:
You Can’t Skip Steps.
I recently encountered some wonderful wisdom in a TikTok, and I wish I could find it to credit the creator. She shared that in any endeavor, seek out enough education to get started, and then go and do. More importantly, go and FAIL. When you fail, examine what happened. Diagnose your failure, adjust your work, and try again. If, and only if, you can’t figure out what went wrong or how to fix it, that is when you go back to education and learn more.
It’s one of my most frequent mistakes. I am a thinker, researcher, a perpetual student, and those are wonderful qualities to an extent. But you cannot study your way into never having a learning curve. You will either never begin at all, or quickly become discouraged that you somehow didn’t skip out on being a beginner.
You cannot know what clay feels like without sticking your hands into it. In a world filling up with generative ai, don’t try to skip the process and get right to the outcome. The experience, the process, the mistakes and hard-won knowledge, the imperfection is what gives meaning to making.
Don’t overcomplicate it before you’ve even tried.
This is the first greeting card I ever attempted on the press - I still think it’s cute, but I could write a whole post on what I learned from making it and what I would do differently if I were to re-do it!
Authenticity is Worth the Vulnerability.
If the process is worth doing, it’s worth sharing. Even when that feels terrifying.
The hardest part of being a self-employed artist, in my opinion, is trying to force my creative brain into acting like a business shark. Like, three raccoons in a trench coat, “how do you do, fellow kids,” vibes. I cringe away from things that feel inauthentic, and for a long time, marketing my services felt that way.
Here’s why:
Art is a process, and marketing felt like pretending to be on the other side of a finish line that didn’t exist.
It stopped me from sharing my work and connecting with the people who might be interested in what I’m doing. I didn’t want to market, because it felt like lying. I learn so much after every project that it felt inauthentic to go out and say, “Buy this! It’s perfect! It’s the best you’ll ever find!” Not because I don’t believe in my work—I’m proud of what I make—but because the piece already taught me something new for next time.
To ever grow, I needed a mindset shift. So now, instead of viewing sharing as marketing a finished product and living in fear that people will find me lacking, I view it as sharing what I’m doing: the process, the successes, and, yes, the failures.
Of course, if you’re a client, you’re not going to receive a failure from me as your finished product. But my client work will only flourish the more I try things and put them out there, for others to learn from and for me to learn from others. The more I grow and evolve as an artist. It’s the spirit of this blog.
On that note…
Don’t Be an island.
This one is difficult for me. I like to figure things out in my own way, in my own time. But it’s tied in to my first two tenets: the vulnerable perfectionist inside me prefers to skip the mess and hide the mistakes. When people would try to help me, it never felt helpful. Here’s why: I never shared anything that was still living and breathing, only a calcified final product that wasn’t working for reasons I couldn’t articulate.
There was no real connection happening. Even if I felt things weren’t working, I’d hidden away the faults as best as possible and wasn’t really open to getting back into the guts. It was finished, after all!
Beyond just help and critique, however, making is more fun when you abandon the myth of mystique, pull back the curtain, and get out there. I received more buy-in on what I’m doing than ever before when I simply said to my friends and family, ‘Hey, it’s sunny out, I’m an artist, and I want to make something. I’m taking requests.’
Recommendations.
If any of this resonated with you and you want to keep exploring ideas in this vein, I have a recommendation! Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon is a very easy to digest book full of practical tips and motivation. No affiliation, I just like what he has to say.