Perfect or finished. That is the choice.

The last month has felt like a struggle to get my routine back on track after being taken down by COVID. Blaming getting ill is not helpful though. Action is the key.

First, an example. I have an unreasonable number of blog posts that are 90% finished but which remain unpublished because of some strange sense that they need to be perfect in order to publish, as if only perfection will please the discerning eyes of my readers. I need to work on accepting that enough is often enough. This includes choosing to publish posts that are good enough over endlessly working on and improving posts that will never actually be shared.

Perfect or finished. That is the choice.

This is an idea I first came across in Good Work If You Can Get It, which I read before committing to a PhD. The quote from the book is:

A good dissertation is done. A good dissertation is published. A perfect dissertation is neither.

I often remind myself with my PhD that what I want to end up with is a finished one and not a perfect one. How is it then that this lesson which connected with me so well when I read it in the context of doing a PhD seemed to be quickly forgotten when I stopped posting for a few weeks? As if the longer I waited until my next post, the better the next post would need to be, thereby making it even less likely to get another post published and further increasing the time between that and the previous one, and so on and on and nothing got published.

It's strange how lessons have to be relearnt in different contexts, or even in the same context sometimes if enough time has passed without being tested on the lesson.

This is my post for today, and I am choosing to have it finished.