Maker Monsters: A Practical Guide to Beating Perfectionism
Few things turn energizing creative projects into draining, fear-ridden work like … well … work. I’m sure you enjoy being creative, but when it’s your job, challenges can crop up which might change how you feel. When this happens, the thing you once loved can leave you feeling empty and exhausted at the end of the day.
That’s when we start to wrestle with our work—rather than dance with it. And that … stresses me out.
Sure, some problems are external. Things like bosses, deadlines, and money. But most obstacles that we encounter are actually internal.
I call these Maker Monsters.
In a recent episode of Unthinkable, my storytelling podcast about creating work that resonates, we addressed the concept of maker monsters by name for the first time. It was eye-opening, so I thought I’d share everything I learned here, in writing.
It starts in “the gap,” first made famous by Ira Glass, host of This American Life. When you’re creating something, your taste often exceeds your skills. The only way to get through that gap is to ship a lot of work and to hone your skills. You just have to slog it out.
Over time, you get closer and closer to matching what’s in your head every time you ship a creative product. But your tastes are constantly evolving. So the gap persists. You never feel like you reach the other side.
I think most creative people genuinely love this. We enjoy hacking away in the steamy jungles of the gap, tinkering and learning constantly. We’re never quite “done.” We enjoy being challenged, discovering new skills and shipping new projects. We’re happy there in the jungle between us and the other side of this ravine. But lurking deep in that jungle are some maker monsters. We’ve heard the stories from others we admire. We’ve seen the claw-marked wooden signs at the beginning of our path: DANGER: Here Be Monsters.
These maker monsters include things like imposter syndrome, writer’s block, and analysis paralysis -- just to name a few from a much longer list.
Today, I wanted to dive below the treeline into the jungle and meet two creatives who have battled -- and continue to battle -- their own maker monsters: Lizzie Peabody and Tucker Brian. Both of them reveal how to confront a particularly hairy monster: perfectionism.
Wrestling with perfectionism
Lizzie Peabody works as the host and producer of the Sidedoor podcast, which delves deep into the hidden histories and unknown stories of the Smithsonian’s archives. Her work takes her (and her listeners) through the side door of the organization’s various museums. It’s there, when crafting these previously unknown stories and bringing them out for public consumption, she confronts the maker monster known as perfectionism.
“Every two weeks my task is to produce a show that represents everything I am capable of as a person...that’s a lot of pressure to put on yourself.” - Lizzie Peabody
Sometimes you, like Lizzie, might feel like you’ll only be judged on the last piece of work you’ve shipped. You’re only as good as the most recent attempt, so it better represent the best of you -- meaning EVERY attempt must represent the best of you. That can be exhausting, or even prevent you from pushing forward.
Tucker Bryant has similar issues. He’s a poet and keynote speaker who recently left a marketing job at Google to bet it all on his art. He’s had similar issues to Lizzie with this maker monster.
He describes perfectionism as what happens when the gap stops you from shipping your work (or creating altogether.) It’s an over-indexing on the crafting element of creativity at the expense of the emotional, imaginative, and playful experience of just making things.
And it can halt his entire process. When this happens to Tucker or to you, it’s like the internal narrator starts seeding doubt that we can’t proceed:
You shouldn’t put it out there.
It’s not good enough; it won’t impress anybody.
You’d be better off abandoning the idea.
When you’re in the claws of the perfectionism monster, it can start to feel like there’s no way out.
Scarcity mindset, meet abundance mindset
So how did Lizzie and Tucker get over their perfectionism issues?
It starts with managing their scarcity mindset and moving toward an abundance mindset instead. Let’s take a moment to define these two terms.
Scarcity mindset is the idea that there's only so much pie to go around. If someone else takes a piece, then there’s less for you. Steven Covey coined this term in his classic work, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
There’s plenty of pie to go around. Source: Amazon
Abundance mindset is the belief that there's plenty of pie for everyone, so we should celebrate each others’ successes. Just because someone else is having a nice slice of pie, it doesn’t mean they’re taking it away from you.
I like to think of it as being an eater vs. being a baker. If you’re a baker, you can just bake your own pie. But if you’re an eater? Once you’ve gobbled it up, it’s all gone. Your only option is to keep grabbing at a bigger slice of a finite pie, and anyone else who gets a bite is necessarily hurting you. What a horrible way to work!
On Unthinkable, Lizzie talked about a particularly challenging podcast episode that brought her face to face with her monsters. It was all about race and the history of racism in America.
People trusted her with deeply personal stories, and she felt huge pressure to do justice to their words. It was so stressful she couldn’t sleep at night.
The Sidedoor podcast explores the hidden secrets of the Smithsonian. Source: Sidedoor
Eventually, she released an episode she felt proud to publish -- but she couldn’t repeat that same agonizing process. The next episode, she decided to challenge herself to (in her words) care as little as possible. To phone it in.
Wait, what?
Obviously, she still wanted to do justice to the next story on her show and to produce a great final episode. This means certain levels of fact-checking and journalistic integrity, storytelling chops, and intuitive creation. But again, she couldn’t repeat her battle with perfectionism that made the process of her prior episode such a nightmare. So, for the next story she told, instead of reading every book on the subject, she read one. Instead of giving her body and soul to the story, she got some rest at night.
“I changed my measure of success. Success for me now is letting go of perfection and just making a story.” - Lizzie Peabody
She said she went on to make a great episode -- and actually had fun doing it.
Thanks to that experience, Lizzie realized that she is so much more than just what she can make. She isn’t her work. She’s a whole person. And while she should use her full self and all her skills and tastes in her storytelling, she is not her storytelling. She is not simply the production of a podcast. The less she conflates her self worth with her work, the happier she gets -- and the better the work gets too. (Imagine that.)
In fact, in the big picture, there really is no “perfect” in this line of work anyway. You simply decide it’s good enough and you move on to create another thing, another day, getting better all the while.
Tucker’s tangle with perfectionism
Tucker Bryant first became fascinated by a different concept during the global pandemic. Not perfectionism. Escapism. He told me he kept reminiscing about childhood memories, quitting his job, and escaping the pandemic -- all variations of that same concept. So he decided to sit down and write a collection of poetry about the idea, since it kept creeping into his mind in different ways.
That morning, he made a cup of tea and got everything ready. He settled into his comfy couch as the warm sun poured through his window in San Francisco. He thought about this grand plan in his head to write scores of poems by the end of the day, a genius and nuanced look at how the idea of escapism serves us as humans.
Of course, what happened?
The Monster of Perfectionism reared its ugly head. After writing a few lines, he started to focus on everything that didn’t feel right about the poem. All that excitement he felt earlier simply evaporated.
“That feeling when you hit a breakthrough when you’re working and the thought of sharing it feels exciting and joyful. Perfectionism is ...the opposite of that.” -Tucker Bryant
Instead of nuanced genius, he came to see the poems as awkward, inarticulate, and uninspired. As he admitted in a vulnerable moment of the Unthinkable episode, he began to rely on substances -- a problem he’d grappled with for awhile prior to that one morning trying to write poetry. Instead of confronting his perfectionism, he reached for opioids, telling himself that would loosen his mind and get him in the creative zone.
It didn’t.
He put down his pen and paper and went back to just … daydreaming. He pictured perfection. He thoght about how great his collection would look when it finished, but he never actually finished. He never returned to writing. There he sat, with his ideas not yet on the page but rather in his head, where they could remain perfect.
Forever.
Tucker realized something important over time. He came to see that “bad” art was not actually a failure. Things don’t have to be perfect to justify their existence. And when you accept that, you take a lot of the pressure off the creative process. You view creativity for what it is: repetition plus reinvention over time. Make something. Then make the next something, but slightly better. Do that again and again and again.
You’ll make progress if you do. Sometimes, it’ll feel like a straight line. Often, it won’t. Regardless, you’re taking swing after swing through the jungle inside the gap, overcoming maker monsters as you refuse to stop and sit. You just keep hacking away. You just keep shipping.
As creative people, whether we build businesses or snap pictures, write business plans or job descriptions or marketing copy, we can use our art as a means of connection. Sometimes, that means connecting other people to us. More often, however, our work only resonates with others because we first made sense of something ourselves, in our own minds, where we confront our maker monsters freely.
Said Tucker, that’s where our art becomes a means to communicate with the universe. Like any relationship, we don’t have a duty to provide mind-blowing revelations with every conversation we have or every product we ship.
It’s ars gratia artis—art for art’s sake.
Done often enough, our work tends to break free from the clutches of perfectionism and other maker monsters and break out into the world, where it can resonate with others.
Keep battling your maker monsters. Keep making what matters.
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To listen to the entire story -- the first in a short miniseries on maker monsters -- stream the episode below or visit this page to find your podcast player of choice. You’re two taps away from listening to the episode. We took some chances with the sound and style, and I think you’ll love it. Thanks!
MOVING AND SURPRISING ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
“This is beyond great! Business shows are SO repetitive in guests and format. Unthinkable and Jay Acunzo are so refreshing and tell emotional, different stories.” — Apple Podcast review