My understanding of perfectionism is a little different from most people’s.
There’s a lot of content about this online, and the consensus is remarkably consistent: don’t be a perfectionist, just start, ship it and iterate, done is better than perfect. The logic sounds reasonable, and it’s not hard to act on — a lot of people have genuinely gotten moving because of it.
I don’t think that’s wrong.
But my own experience of perfectionism doesn’t sit in the same place as the one those pieces describe. It’s not that they’re mistaken — it’s that the layer they address doesn’t contain what I’ve been feeling. I look for myself in there and can’t find me.
Until I read something Ira Glass said.
He said it like this: “All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.”
That landed. Not because it comforted me — because it named precisely what I’d been living with. The feeling wasn’t relief. It was recognition.
And that gap — I knew it intimately.
I wrote privately for a long time. And for a long stretch of that time, I was genuinely in pain — I’d finish something, look at it, and get angry. Really angry, at myself. This is the best I could do? My taste would tell me exactly where it was soft, where it was false, where it still fell short. But my hands hadn’t caught up. Sometimes I’d tear it down halfway through. Sometimes I’d finish and delete everything and start again. The gap was real and clear enough that pretending it wasn’t there was impossible.
But I didn’t stop.
“Not good enough yet” was never an exit for me. It was a judgment — taste speaking, giving me direction, telling me where to go next. So I’d sit back down and keep writing.
After a long time writing privately, I started publishing.
Now I occasionally go back and look at the things I’ve already put out. Not to check the numbers — not likes, shares, or saves. I open the piece and read it through, start to finish.
I notice that I genuinely want to read it. Want to feel it. Not out of ego, not self-absorption — I just want to spend time with the essay itself. It grew from somewhere inside me, and when I read it I’m not thinking about reach or conversion. Just the piece. The feeling is quiet, and certain.
I’ve started being willing to call what I make work — in the sense of a body of work, something made with craft and intention.
I used to flinch from that word. It felt like overclaiming. Now I use it because when I look back, I can appreciate what I made without reservation. Not because it’s flawless — because it’s what I actually wanted. I didn’t settle. I didn’t do the “fine, this’ll do” thing. I didn’t stop and hand something in when my taste was still saying not quite.
That’s the place I think perfectionism is actually trying to reach.
Not never publishing. Not waiting forever.
Just that on the day you do publish — you didn’t settle.