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As more and more is shared, I've seen my kids not want to try things simply because they see people doing the same thing amazingly well. The same people doing things so amazingly well don't necessarily share all the work and failures that went into getting there which is a shame and probably a better lesson then the end result.
I struggle with starting. I think I can't accomplish the perfect result I envision so I find myself paralyzed and unable to begin.
To help with that I remind myself of the Pareto principle. If I can accept that I may get MOST of the way to my goal on the smaller portion of my effort, I can usually get started.
The next struggle is finishing things, running into barriers and deciding to start over instead of overcoming them, or moving on to a different project. I don't currently have strategies for that unfortunately.
It's hard to break these mindsets and habits.
By being imperfect, I guess?
The mantra, "A timely wrong decision is often better than no decision," has been helpful in my life. (my own adaptation of Kelly Johnson's statement here: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/97803-skunk-works (search for "wrong decision") )
how about the iraq war. that was timely and costly wrong decision
We'd be a lot better off if we ditched the concept of perfection and go with "perpetual improvement' instead.
When you go to heaven, you reach a state of perpetual improvement. :-)
I’ve found that sharing my work actively as it is being created helps. I write a lot of documents that get delivered to the end user or customer and I now tend to share them really early as an rough “sneak peek”… once they’ve seen it “ugly” as a early work-in-progress I tend to be able to let go of my tendency to over refine the final version. It really focuses my work around “what is needed to get this good enough to work for you?” This doesn’t work for all clients or in all situations, but it can be really effective when it does.
I also keep notes on “how I would make this perfect later” . I almost never return to those “// Improve Me” comments, but it somehow lifts the weight just to acknowledge that I saw a thing that I could improve, and walked anyway because I wanted to eat dinner with my family that night. I suppose it’s a bit like like productivity confession…
Having the combination of a place to put the ideas and then see progress (via the DONE- prefixes) was helpful to me in (partially) tackling rampant perfectionism.
As a concrete example, this weekend I was working on a tracker for my old boiler (a 1950s cast iron atmospheric with a single stage burner, fixed temp limits, simple relay-based bang/bang control system) to guide my selection for the new system this summer.
The system could lookup the outdoor temp, humidity, precipitation and temperature forecast, track the gas meter, calculate the reset target, tell when various zones are calling for heat, figure out how long the burner ran, intercept and proxy/rewrite the thermostat calls for heat, log data to Icinga/DynamoDB, have a Grafana dashboard, do anomaly detection, have a 7-segment display, have a web interface, speak MQTT, be queryable by Alexa, etc. But the first thing it needs is a temperature sensor for the boiler, so I made a long list, but worked on that first. (Then OTA updates so I could update it without disconnecting anything. Then on a web interface so I could avoid building any other interaction methods. Then an SVG graph of the last hour of data, then…) I find “my task for the next 20-30 minutes is clear” to be super helpful.
Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/VM7nD74