The crippling black hole of perfectionism and learning to be just good enough
Mark Settle
I worked in the DJ tech media for 20 years. I created skratchworx, DJWORX, and am now being creative in The Worxlab.
Some of my LinkedIn friends from my old career will relate to this post and might cause flashbacks and maybe trigger Photoshop PTSD.
This will explain the headline for so many people — when cleaning up an image in Photoshop, it’s easy to get lost in “deblegging”.
This is the process of zooming in to obliterate the stray marks inherent in creating photos. A hair here, a spec of dust on the sensor there… these blegs must go because commercial printers have perfected how to make them 20 times bigger than they were.
And it’s the deepest black hole of productivity ever.
What starts off as getting rid of the ones you can see at 100% becomes an infinite zooming-in process where you eventually wail at the screen for not being able to edit at a subatomic level.
It’s an obsessive process, and knowing when to stop is hard. And it’s a trait I have suffered from badly. Less so these days but at times, like this morning, I teetered on the edge of the productivity precipice again.
I’m about to put my Allen & Heath Xone:92 illustration in my shop. And one final final FINAL (creatives know the score) revisit showed me that the colour matching needed work.
I could have spent days (yes I’ve done it) nudging colour parameters up and down to get the closest match known to man, but I knew I had to persuade my inner crippling perfectionist that the colour match was now good enough.
Even those words are difficult to type. Simply good enough is wrong, right?
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You see, colour is subjective. It depends on so many parameters and variables, often the biggest variable being the viewer. I soon realised that trying to get a perfect match between a glittery anodised metal sample and museum-grade archival paper using pigment ink was a fool's errand.
But after four hours, dozens of test prints, and much walking around looking for different lighting environments, it was indeed good enough.
And I’m becoming more comfortable with that too. There’s a lot I want to achieve in this new creative venture, and I need to accept that my good enough is probably somebody else’s perfection.
I’m learning to recalibrate my bad, good enough, and perfect lines in the sand. And sooner rather than later, I utter the immortal words of Farmer Hoggett — “that’ll do pig, that’ll do”.
End note — I smashed this article out in an hour right after a morning of colour matching. I could beat myself up over the lack of witty prose and overly wordy nature.
But it's fit for purpose. It's good enough.
Experienced creative marketing professional and coach
4moThe great thing about ‘good enough’ is that it has a target: good enough *for* something. I believe that for many that struggle with perfectionism their definition of ‘perfect’ doesn’t contain that target — it has become an abstract concept. I’ve found it helpful to explore the root of the pursuit of ‘perfect’ (within myself and with others), in an effort to uncover what it is about our self beliefs that we are protecting in said pursuit. Like so many things, perfectionism is a symptom of a deeper drive… hit me up if you fancy a chat!
I’ve been an amateur Photoshopper in my spare time and oh yes this resonates. Cleaning up at 800% just to make a photoshop on request or for a laugh on a forum post (I started in 1998, for some context - the time before Facebook, where forums and communities were still a thing). I used to be a perfectionist in music composition as well but as a professional I learned the hard way to kill your darlings. I wrote for theater shows and would make a demo for the rehearsals, and then work for weeks on the ‘real thing’ with better sounds, convincing orchestral sounds in stead of General MIDI et cetera. But after the rehearsals theater groups did not want the better track. They loved and got used to that unpolished demo. I must admit that I can still be a perfectionist when commissioning AVCL-systems 🫣 It’s so hard to do stuff, as the Swedes say, lagom. It’s a life long struggle. I applaud your recovery and resilience. We could learn from punk rock: you don’t have to be a wunderkind to play the most functional and to the point music. If you can only play what you have to, it’s perfectly suitable. No polishing needed.
Technical Manager at AMDEA
4moUnderstood, you absolutely do have to get that special Xone grey right especially if its going up on the wall. What a fabulous homage piece! "Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry : French writer
Executive Coach, specialising in Neurodiversity & Productivity
4moResonated with me. I spent the best part of a year in my masters working on 'good enough', and I still haven't licked it, though more often than not, the perfection I seek stops me from even starting. Thank you Mark, for writing this article. I made me smile and feel less alone.
AVoIPoE Evangelist
4moI don't understand? You're doing art now, so surely part of the value of your work is the expression you apply and the fact you're obsessive about every detail should be reflected in your art. Of course if you're churning out content for social media, where you have to make an immediate impact and the attention span is 2 seconds then ye good enough is fine but that's not what you're doing right? So I'm confused?