However, this process has been anything but easy. The main reason for this has been my inner naysayer – that little voice in my head that tells me that one topic isn’t worth blogging about, that I haven’t got enough information to write a worthy article on another subject, etcetera. This inner demon I have been fighting ever since I restarted this blog, a minimum of twice a week, but in reality, more times than that.
It so happens that I have a name for this inner demon – and that name is “overperfectionism”. Proper doses of perfectionism can enable someone to produce the finest work by driving them to put that extra effort into doing it right rather than doing it in a half-posterior manner. However, excessive amounts of perfectionism (hence the “over” prefix in “overperfectionism”) can result in someone producing nothing at all when they are not sure that they can produce something that is up to unreasonably high standards.
Don’t get me wrong – there can be times when there is a defect in a work that is serious enough that it really would have been better to not have produced that work at all. For example, a software developer who produces computer code that is full of bugs is doing people a disservice by submitting that buggy software rather than going back to the drawing board and writing the software correctly. Even a healthy perfectionist will hold back in such situations.
However, there are other flaws that can exist in a work that are only worth a finite amount of effort to avoid, and which producing a work with those flaws is still better than producing nothing at all. An example of this might be computer code that is completely free of bugs, but whose algorithm falls short of being the most efficient possible. Such flaws, even a healthy perfectionist will avoid if they can with reasonable effort, but only an excessive perfectionist, an overperfectionist, will spend more resources on fixing such a flaw than makes sense, and certainly only an overperfectionist will hold out altogether on producing or releasing such a work.
Overperfectionism is a factor that makes blogging much more difficult for me than it otherwise would be. Since I have resumed blogging (that is, since I made that forementioned commitment to update this blog twice a week) I have not managed to turn this blog into the widely circulated resource that every blogger hopes that their blog will become. My reader base has remained small – but from what I can tell, it has remained satisfied. By that, I mean that from the feedback I receive, it seems that the few people who read my blog find what they read to be worth reading. This does not change the fact that every time I update my blog, I have doubts as to whether what I am submitting is worthy. What is worse is that there are times when this mindset prevents me from submitting something that I wrote, and even more frequently prevents me from writing anything at all in the first place on a perfectly worthy subject.
I sometimes doubt that I’d update my blog more than once every few months were it not for this twice-a-week commitment. Therefore, it goes without saying that this commitment has increased the quantity of my blog posts. However, what I have found to my surprise is that this commitment to disregard the taunts of my inner voice of doubt at least twice a week per step of the writing process has not only improved the quantity, but also the quality of my posts.
How could this be so? Well, in the past, the unreasonably high standards that I set for my posts not only caused me to post less and less frequency as the bar crept higher, but it also caused the subject matter to be more restricted and, as time went by, of interest to an increasingly small niche. This was because the inner demon of overperfectionism would tell me that I was “off-brand” if I wasn’t writing about a subject that I regularly wrote about – or that it wasn’t “blogworthy” if it didn’t go into greater depths of any of my increasingly narrow range of topics, often depths that might be better covered in formats other than a blog (such as an ebook or whatnot). As a result, while some of my posts (like one that I wrote on how Stoicism is very useful for activists) turned out to be quite useful for some people, most of my posts were increasingly unrelatable.
However, requiring myself to update my blog twice a week has forced me to blog on a more diverse range of subjects. It also has forced me to go ahead and publish a lot of articles despite the fact that they didn’t discuss matters at a depth that would be more appropriate for an ebook than for a blog.
What can make it so difficult to overcome overperfectionism is that we may be afraid of going too far, all the way to the other extreme, underperfection, also known as “carelessness”, “slovenliness”, or a number of other unflattering things. This concern is not exactly an unjustified concern, as there are plenty of negative consequences of that other extreme as well. The challenge is in finding the right balance, because either extreme is something that is best avoided.
Of course, there is no easy answer on how exactly to strike this right balance (at least no easy answer that I know of – and if you find such an easy formula, be sure to use the comment section on this blog to let me know about it). That said, where blogging is concerned, setting a reasonable schedule for updates and forcing yourself to adhere to it is generally considered to be a good in-the-mean-time approach for until an ideal formula for the happy medium is devised.
And so far, trying this approach by updating twice a week seems to be working pretty well for me.
