As creative business owners, we’ve experienced our fair share of self-doubt when it comes time to publish. Is this good enough? Can I do better? Will anyone like it?
Knowing where to start is tricky; knowing when you’re ready to publish is even trickier.
In this blog post, we’ll tell you all about the trick that changed our mindset and got us ready to publish. This trick helped us break through our perfectionist cycle and launch our Seriously Fun Podcast, a t-shirt store, a YouTube channel, and many more projects that are on the way.
Discomfort with something new
We spent the majority of 2021 launching Modek Media. In November 2021, we dreamt up the idea for the Seriously Fun podcast, with plans to start publishing before Christmas. We bought podcast mics, desktop boom arms to hold them, a new table for our office to use for the broadcasts, and set up documents to help plan episodes.
However the moment we got on the mic and started talking, we realised it was going to take a lot more work than we’d first thought.
What we found was simply this: we weren’t comfortable with the platform and the process yet. We felt awkward: it was new, different, unfamiliar. We needed to upskill and quickly if we wanted to publish before Christmas. So we practised – a lot!
Every day for several weeks, we sat in front of our podcast mics and we spoke. Cracked jokes. Figured out how far away we needed to be from the mic. Learned when to let the other person speak so our words didn’t run all over one another. We got better, we got comfortable.
With this newfound comfort, we found the process got quicker. We were feeling confident, ideas were flowing, our inhibitions were easing with each time we practised, and we edged closer and closer towards publishing.
The problem was, every time we listened back to an episode during the edit phase, we were getting frustrated or feeling insecure. Every time we listened back, we had an overwhelming urge to want to start the episode over again. We can do better than this. It’s not good enough. We just need to record it one more time…
What we were yet to realise is this: we were stuck in a perfectionist mindset.
The perfectionist cycle
Building frustrations and a sense of urgency led us to re-evaluate the entire podcast process several times. After addressing our discomfort, we noticed other things were pain points too.
If it’s not discomfort, maybe it’s the content we’re talking about. We decided to restructure what the podcast’s focus was about and leaned into our silly friendship more, making this the main focus of the podcast. We created the Nuggets Of Wisdom episodes to tackle our journey as creatives building a business, sharing tips and strategies for creative start-ups.
That didn’t work. It just further added to our comfort in front of the mic.
If it’s not the content, then maybe it’s the energy and delivery. We decided next to start practising alone and to change the way we delivered things using different vocal inflections, hyping ourselves up before recording, pausing when we felt the energy lapsing.
That didn’t work either. We just sounded better and more interesting.
If it’s not the energy and delivery, then why aren’t we published yet? The answer was simple: it wasn’t perfect yet. We were stuck in a mindset where we were obsessed with reaching an optimal level of perfectionism – one that we would never achieve because our expectations were unrealistic. And so the cycle continued: record, review, rerecord, review, so on and so forth.
The perfectionist mindset was inhibiting us from getting our stuff out there and we realised quickly we needed to upskill in this area too. So we did some soul searching and turned to some of our muses for inspiration.
Embrace the suck
We first heard this phrase from Ali Abdaal earlier this year. It's origins come from the military, it's slang to "consciously accept or appreciate something that is extremely unpleasant but unavoidable." Jocko Willink also explains this in relation to self-discipline from the perspective of a Navy Seal.
In Jocko’s video, he is addressing the Pennsylvania National Guard, his old stomping grounds. He talks about boot camp and how much it sucks, speaking from the angle of discipline and why it’s important to embrace the difficult, hard and awful things that suck. He says it teaches resilience, and it makes you stronger – individually and as part of a team.
In Ali’s video, he talks about what he learned throughout 2021, giving some great book recommendations and life lessons. His lesson on perfectionism was simple: embracing "the suck" helps you to break your perfectionism cycle and start publishing your work. It stops you from getting stuck trying to make something good before you just start in general.
This is where we were with our podcast: trapped in a review cycle where we were trying to make something perfect, ultimately failing to reach an unrealistic goal.
The embrace the suck phrase resonated so powerfully with us that we did an entire Nuggets Of Wisdom episode on it.
Conclusion
Embracing the suck has helped us enormously when it comes to publishing our ideas. Once they’re out there and made public, we find ourselves feeling more energised and accomplished. Simply because we’re no longer striving to reach a perfect quality – we’ve embraced that it’s good enough to publish.
Like we said in the podcast, the more you practice something, the better it gets. Remember the power of mindset when it comes to publishing. Instead of thinking that practice makes perfect, start thinking practice makes improvement.
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