Today, let's notice how our perfectionistic tendencies are stifling productive action.
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TODAY'S INSPIRATION FROM JULIA CAMERON
Tillie Olsen correctly calls it the “knife of the perfectionist attitude in art.”
You may call it something else. Getting it right, you may call it, or fixing it before I go any further. You may call it having standards. What you should be calling it is perfectionism.
Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right.
It has nothing to do with fixing things. It has nothing to do with standards. Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop—an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole. Instead of creating freely and allowing errors to reveal themselves later as insights, we often get mired in getting the details right. We correct our originality into a uniformity that lacks passion and spontaneity. “Do not fear mistakes,” Miles Davis told us. “There are none.”
Instead of enjoying the process, the perfectionist is constantly grading the results.
The perfectionist has married the logic side of the brain. The critic reigns supreme in the perfectionist’s creative household. A brilliant descriptive prose passage is critiqued with a white-glove approach: “Mmm. What about this comma? Is this how you spell ... ?”
To the perfectionist, there is always room for improvement. The perfectionist calls this humility. In reality, it is egotism. It is pride that makes us want to write a perfect script, paint a perfect painting, perform a perfect audition monologue.
Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough— that we should try again.
No. We should not.
That is a normal part of creativity—letting go. We always do the best that we can by the light we have to see by.
(The Artist's Way, 2016, p. 119-120)
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📣 TODAY'S AFFIRMATION
Read the following affirmation out loud with purpose and intent:
I let go of needing perfection and enjoy the process of my creative endeavors.
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💪 TODAY'S CREATIVE EXERCISE
Collect a stack of at least ten magazines, which you will allow yourself to freely dismember. Setting a twenty-minute time limit for yourself, tear (literally) through the magazines, collecting any images that reflect your life or interests. Think of this collage as a form of pictorial autobiography. Include your past, present, future, and your dreams. It is okay to include images you simply like. Keep pulling until you have a good stack of images (at least twenty). Now take a sheet of newspaper, a stapler, or some tape or glue, and arrange your images in a way that pleases you. (This is one of my students’ favorite exercises.)
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💬 TODAY'S QUOTE
"Cerebration is the enemy of originality in art."
– Martin Ritt
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📓 TODAY'S JOURNAL PROMPT
What is the next best step you can take on an unfinished project?
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