F*ck Perfection.

It's where creativity goes to die.

Hi! A quick word about the Substack app: One of the big draws of Substack for me is the fact that it has this incredible app where you can directly interact with the authors and the community. Long ago, back in ancient times, people “liked” and commented on blog posts but that’s when Kendra Scott jewelry was considered cutting edge and neon colored jeans were all the rage.

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Earlier this week, I received this DM from a tried and true fan:

This isn’t the first time I’ve been asked this kind of question, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. My response to her was along the lines of I literally have to write and create. I don’t have a choice. It’s sort of involuntarily, really. I’ve tried not to or to at least take a step back countless times, but it never lasts very long.

“As for starting,” I wrote her, “you literally just have to. You don’t need to have anything figured out. You don’t need to have the perfect setup and the right equipment. You just START.”

“Ughhh,” she replied. “But my ADHD perfectionism!”

And this is what got me.

FUCK perfection. The mere idea that there is such a thing as perfect in any sense of the word will physically and mentally debilitate you if you let it. Convincing yourself that there’s an exact right way to do something, and claiming you won’t be satisfied until you’ve achieved this arbitrary goal can and will keep you from realizing your greatest passions and acting on them.

I had no game plan when I bought emmasthing.com 13 years ago. All I knew was that I needed a creative outlet, blogs were new and exotic, and I was a writer so it just made sense to fire ‘er up. For years, I had no idea what I was doing on my website or social media. I still don’t, really. My entire creative journey has been scratching the incessant itch I feel to create by throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks, but not taking my life over it.

Some may argue that perhaps if I did take my life over it a little more, I could be further along by now. Something bigger. Something more popular. But I could also be nowhere had I sat day after day with these ideas under a rationalization microscopic looking for any glitch small enough to deter me from even beginning.

You will never get it completely right because there is no such thing, and believing that there is is what holds back raw potential. You will flounder. You will flop. You’ll have great days and terrible days. And just when you think you’ve figured it out, you’ll realize you know nothing because that’s what it is to create continuously.

Point in case: The content that I’ve spent the most amount of time crafting in the past never “performs” as well as the content I create on a whim, in the moment. I’m a one or two take kind of gal because I simply don’t have the time to spend perfecting every single thought or idea that shows up in my brain. Some content calls for thoughtful processes, sure. But 9 times out of 10, I lean into my stream of consciousness way of approaching these things because I’m too tired to make things so

Curated

Calculated

or Premeditated

That shit isn’t real. We’re all figuring it out. No one knows what they’re doing, especially when it comes to exercising creative muscles. Most of us are just acting on this incessant need to create and see what comes of it. Could be bad, could be good but regardless of what it is, it’s feeding us in all the right ways and that’s what matters.

In fact, Giannis Antetokounmpo himself (the star forward of the Milwaukee Bucks) went viral this very week for answering a reporter’s question about failure in general and everyone needs to listen to his response because it applies to this line of conversation.

When you just start, every step you take forward is exactly that… a step forward. Period. You’ve probably seen a variation of that saying in relation to exercise: It doesn’t matter how slow you move as long as you’re moving forward. You can have the shittiest computer on Earth, the ugliest website, terrible self-promotion tactics, an awful microphone, and an all-consuming case of imposter syndrome, but what matters—what’s really truly important—is that you’re doing it. Not just because you want to but because you need to. Because for as many fuck-ups you make or lulls you experience or crippling self doubt you find yourself suffocating under, the joy and freedom that you feel from what you’re allowing yourself to explore is invaluable.

No one and nothing is perfect, and if it seems that way, I challenge you to look closer. The creative process is painful and confusing, sure, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the pain and confusion you’ll feel from allowing the fabrication of perfectionism to keep you from just starting.

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I have so many more thoughts on this, but it’s 3pm on a Friday so put a pin in this and we’ll talk about it again some other time. It’s a short letter this week, but an important one and I hope it resonated with you.

Have a wonderful weekend and we’ll meet here again next week!

—EGM